Within These Walls
by Beta Gyre
Summary: Flynn sold the crown and got rich, but when a curious young woman wanders up, his life takes an unexpected turn. Something from her past is drawing her into strange, dark pursuits, and it does not mean either of them well. Based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft.
1. A Prequel and a Result

**Author's Note**: This is a different type of story from anything I've written for this fandom before. I haven't seen many straight-up Gothic horror fics for _Tangled,_ and I'm planning to have this done by Halloween as a treat.

This story probably qualifies as a crossover with a particular piece by H. P. Lovecraft, although all the characters are from _Tangled_, the setting is in the environs of the Snuggly Duckling, and the setup is an alternate timeline in which Eugene stole the crown years earlier (before he got involved with the Stabbingtons), got away, and did not have to hide in the tower. The _plot,_ however,will be similar to Lovecraft's story.

**Content Warnings:** This will be a pretty dark story and will contain horror elements in later chapters, but the rating of M is primarily because I have some smut planned for our couple.

**Disclaimer:** _Tangled_ belongs to Disney. _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward _belongs to the estate of H. P. Lovecraft. I'm just having not-for-profit fun with them.

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**Within These Walls**

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**Chapter One: A Prequel and a Result**

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The status of the village of Amwald, or Bywood, was always a bit unclear to its inhabitants. With no mayor, no municipal authorities of its own, and the most prominent buildings being the Snuggly Duckling tavern and the long-abandoned manor house, Amwald would seem to be under direct authority of the State of Corona, and yes, the State could indeed send its knights to the forest and the forest village when the occasion warranted. However, villagers did not possess ballot rights within the kingdom, and it was a rare occasion when the State actually saw fit to dispatch the guard, reserving them, it would seem, for the most egregious crimes against the Crown. For the most part, the State left the little village to its own devices. This policy of negligence allowed a flourishing trade in bootleg tax-free liquor—facilitated by the Snuggly Duckling—to develop, which the Crown surely knew of, but with which it did not interfere. Because the authorities rarely pursued a chase into the forest or Amwald itself, the village became a known hideout for petty criminals of all sorts, a situation which they regarded as a thoroughly acceptable trade-off for not having voting rights on municipal bond issues and taxes.

One instance when Corona _did _send the knights to Amwald was when the royal crown of the lost princess was stolen. It was hopeless, as the Captain himself had known—the thief had stolen it right out from under the guards' noses, climbed up the rope he had strung, and escaped through the roof without anyone even catching a glimpse of him—but they had to at least attempt to run him down, and the disreputable village was the only place anyone could suggest as a starting place. Unfortunately for them, they did not gain a clue as to his identity, nor had any especially suspicious person even been seen rushing through town—although they had their hunches, they could not prove them—and there was no choice but to report back to the monarchs with their negative report, as the regiment had all expected.

What was _not _expected was the King and Queen's reaction to the theft. Fourteen years ago, when the princess herself had been kidnapped by a gnarled old woman that the monarchs had only seen in a half-awake state, they had suffered terribly, as would be expected of parents, but they had managed to continue ruling through their grief, holding fast to the belief that their daughter was yet alive and would be returned to them someday. With the theft of the crown, and nary a suggestion of where the thief might be, they fell into a paralyzing despair, as if the loss of this last artifact reminding them of her existence had brought about the loss of their faith in her survival and hope for her return. They stopped mingling with their people. They stopped having their regular meetings with the representatives of the merchants' guilds and the Captain of the Guard. They stopped writing legislation. They stopped being aware of current civil and criminal affairs that should have required the dispatch of the guard, to the point that it became unsafe even on the island itself for people to walk about after dark. In effect, they stopped governing, buried and subsumed in their own grief.

The people of Corona did not know what to do at first. They had long loved their monarchs, sympathetic as the King and Queen were to enlightened views and friendly and kindly as they were as human beings. They did not _want _to call for their beloved king to step down, but eventually they realized, led by the Captain of the Guard and the head of the Guild, that they had no choice if they wanted to maintain their own security as a nation. At last, a year after the theft of the crown, a council was held to address the growing problems.

The monarchs almost seemed to welcome the plea to either resume governing or step down and let municipal authorities take on the task. Perhaps they had regarded it as an opening to do what they wanted to do anyway, but could not do on their own, out of some still-surviving sense of duty. Whatever the cause might be, they abdicated authority willingly and peacefully. They moved as far from the island capital as they could while still remaining within the authority of the State, building a fine house on the border, far closer to Amwald than the city of Corona. They became, simply, Everard and Sophia von Korona. There, everyone supposed, they would nurse their grief in private. Corona itself transitioned to become a free municipality with elected officials.

For two years after that, no one either in Corona, Amwald, or the rural territories heard a whisper about the lost princess, the crown, or any of the top suspects in the theft. Then, suddenly, a piece of news started to spread like wildfire, beginning in Amwald. The old stone manor house in the village, which had been abandoned ever since its owners—the Corvinus family, formerly of Hungary—had apparently died out four hundred years ago, had been purchased by a young bachelor named Fitzherbert. This in itself was strange enough, but what really set lips moving was the rumor that this "Fitzherbert" person was none other than Flynn Rider, who was suspected in quite a few petty thefts from three to four years ago, as well as the theft of the crown, but none since then. If he was indeed the same person, the warrants for his arrest had been withdrawn by the new municipal government, which had more pressing and violent crimes than three-year-old petty theft to deal with in the wake of the royals' abandonment of responsibility. There was no legal barrier to Rider's purchase of the manor house—but the few upright and principled villagers thought it little more than brazenly thumbing his nose at everyone for him to come back and settle in the old Corvinus house after _he _had, most likely, single-handedly brought down the monarchy and destroyed the little remaining peace of the beloved royal family. The fact that he _could _make such a purchase—and, it became immediately evident, fund the restoration and modernization of the house—seemed to be clear evidence that he was the thief of the lost princess's crown. The crown, it would seem, was permanently lost, sold and probably taken apart by criminal black-marketeers.

Still, Rider—for the young man made no attempt to dispel the rumors about his identity, and almost seemed to welcome them, the way he grinned arrogantly about it whenever he heard them—continued with his project. Eschewing the same upright villagers who also shunned him, he chose to mix with the majority criminal element of the village instead, hiring regulars from the Snuggly Duckling to work on his house. Large ruffians going by the names or nicknames of Vladamir, Big Nose, and Hookhand did carpentry work and heavy labor. Ruffians going by the nicknames of Bruiser and Killer created a lot of the drapery and linens for the house. A ruffian named Gunther helped pick out and move in new furniture into the rooms that Rider/Fitzherbert intended to use. Then, once Rider _was _moved in, Gunther continued to come in periodically and, apparently, act as a housekeeper. A ruffian named Attila evidently served as his cook, going by the place around midday and preparing a meal that was meant to serve as luncheon and dinner. However, Rider himself lived alone in the house, doing nothing, it would seem, but going to the pub (from which he usually did not return until the late night, after, it was thought, filthy scuffles with local Amwald wenches in the inn) and occasionally to the island city (from which he usually returned with books or goods of some sort). He did not thieve from villagers. However he had come by his money—and everyone in Amwald, upright or ruffian, agreed that it had been no honest way—Rider did not seem to be a threat to the community, such as it was. Within a year after his purchase of the Corvinus house, four years after the theft of the crown, people in Amwald finally stopped gossiping about him. After all, when it came down to it, he fit in with the community perfectly.


	2. A Traveler and a Seduction

**Author's Note**: This story earns its rating with this chapter. I apologize pre-emptively for what happens, but there is a reason I've written Flynn as self-centered as I have.

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**Chapter Two: A Traveler and a Seduction**

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Flynn Rider himself—since, of course, the young man residing in the Corvinus house _was _who he was thought to be—would have rather welcomed the decline in gossip, but for one problem: It reflected his own situation all too well. There was nothing to gossip _about._ His life was becoming boring and humdrum. He had long thought that he would be perfectly happy if he could just steal something that would make him filthy rich in a sale, and then use the proceeds to buy a nice mansion somewhere and life a life of ease and idleness. The crown _had_ fetched enough money for him to buy and restore the house, but he had needed to steal other things—including a secret daring raid on no less than the Hapsburg estate in Austria—to set aside enough money in banks that he could live off the interest. This was exactly what he had managed to achieve, but it seemed to him that ease and idleness had passed into a drab, dull routine that varied little.

He was musing on this one rainy night late in July, a book in his lap as he sat in his favorite armchair in his study. Reading was his private passion that he tried very hard to keep under wraps, because although literacy _was _a bragging right in coarse, backwoods Amwald, he was sure it would ruin his reputation if his true passion for books were to get out. He wasn't really _reading_ the book tonight; reminiscences and musings were flying through his brain too fast. He actually rather regretted his lack of concentration; he knew that these nights of domestic reading were precious and should be thoroughly enjoyed whenever he could afford to take them (such as a miserable rainy night when he had a good excuse not to travel). He couldn't spend _too _many nights in his own home or he would lose _other _aspects of his reputation. It was disgusting to him, and made him feel disgusted with himself, that he felt obligated to go to the pub, get drunk, and take some local loose woman to bed fairly regularly just because he was afraid of losing any sexual appeal if he stopped this behavior. Even this, he realized, was just another way that his current lifestyle had become a trap, a cage. Wealth had not given him freedom.

Flynn shook his head silently, heaved a sigh, and tried to force himself to focus on the novel before him. It was actually a very good story, and he should be enjoying it. He glanced at the lamp on his side table. There was enough oil to last all night, he observed with a faint smile of satisfaction, so his reading should not be interrupted by such considerations as _that, _at least. Attila was gone until noon tomorrow, and Gunther wasn't supposed to come clean the place for another week. He was alone—just him and his book.

_Knock, knock._

Flynn started, his gaze drawn abruptly away from the page. His study was just to the right of the front door... but surely nobody was traveling on such a wretched night as this. It had to be a branch knocking against the house in the thunderstorm. He looked back down at his book, trying to refocus on the page.

_Knock, knock, knock._ A very regular—and very non-natural—thumping sounded. No question, this _was _someone at the door. Flynn heaved a sigh. He did not usually have guests. Travelers from outside Amwald either tried to pass through the disreputable village as quickly as they could or stopped in the Snuggly Duckling, rather than daring to ask a local resident for room and board. Too many locals were liquor blockaders, ruffians, thugs, and thieves... including, he thought wryly, the proprietor of this house.

Unfortunately, Flynn realized this meant that this traveler was a lot more likely to be someone who had no fear of Amwald locals. That couldn't be good. He knew he had to answer the door; such a person would take a non-response as an invitation to burglarize the house, especially since it was the largest house in the village and had so recently been restored. He opened the drawer of his side table and removed a long, deadly sharp knife, which he stuck in his belt. Then he left the study and went to the door, hoping that he wouldn't have to use the knife. He had killed one person before, a drunken thug and known murderer, in self-defense, but he had still felt kind of bad about it, and he really didn't want to have to do it again.

Flynn flung open the door. Instinctively his hand went to his belt and the handle of the knife. Such was the result of years of thieving; he had very fast reflexes. However, he saw at once that there would be no need of the weapon.

Outside the manor house stood a slight, thin, pale young woman in a rain-beaten, threadbare dress with a cloak over it. She was carrying a large and heavy-looking parcel. She was soaked from head to toe, but he could tell from the desperate look in her eyes that she was not trying to trick her way into a house that she would then proceed to rob. Apparently, she was a real traveler who had gotten caught in this rain.

She was actually very pretty, Flynn thought at once. Her eyes were bright green and very large, and her hair was a pretty shade of brown, cut short. He was pretty sure he had never seen her before.

"Come in," he found himself saying, ushering her inside and closing the door behind her so that rain would stop blowing into the house. The girl walked weakly and silently into the foyer, looking more relieved to be given shelter than anything else. Flynn carefully removed her cloak and hung it on the coat rack. When he turned to face her again, he noticed that her legs had started to wobble. Instinctively, he put an arm around her waist to steady her.

She glanced gratefully up at him. "Thank you," she said in a hoarse voice. "Could I ask you—who I owe such—"

Her voice was so scratchy that it had to be painful for her to speak, and Flynn couldn't stand that. She didn't need to talk if it hurt her. "The name's Flynn Rider," he said, steering her into the study and helping her into the chair next to the one where he had just been reading. "Are you all right?"

She looked down and nodded as he sat down in his own chair. "I'm fine," she said hoarsely. "My name is Rapunzel."

He wasn't convinced that she was fine at all. "Well, I'm pleased to meet you, Rapunzel... but you sound sick. It's a bad night to be traveling," he said.

"I know," she said softly, "but I had to."

He thought about the parcel that she had left in the foyer. It was pretty large, and it suddenly occurred to him that it might contain all her worldly goods. If she had no choice but to travel on a night like this, she might have been forced to leave her home, wherever that was.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

She looked away. "Not too far away, but... I had to leave. There was no more food."

Flynn jumped up. "I have food," he said. "Wait here."

She stared after him in surprise as he left the study. As he headed toward the room he ate in—not the original, austere, medieval-era dining hall intended for large banquets, but the cozy, private little nook that Gunther had assured him had once been the Corvinus family dining room—he had the thought pass through his mind that Rapunzel might try to take advantage of his absence to steal from his study and then leave before he could return, but he dismissed this as a paranoid idea. She looked far too sick, weak, and, apparently, starving to try such a thing.

He took a glass and a plate out of the china cabinet and gathered up some bread, fresh fruit, a drumstick of cold chicken, and a handful of salad greens. Balancing the food as well as he could, he reached for a jug of water with his other hand. He had a bottle of wine in the study, but she needed something else. He went back to the study with the food and drink.

Rapunzel was still there, and from the look of it, she had only become more relaxed and comfortable in the armchair. As Flynn passed through the doorway, he noticed that she was hunched over and was apparently holding something small in her cupped hands. He entered the room.

"I think he can be trusted."

There was a pause, and then Rapunzel spoke again in a low tone.

"He was nice. He's getting food. He didn't have to."

Flynn felt a vague sense of unease come over him. What was she talking to? As pretty as she was, he didn't really want to open his house up to a crazy person. As he approached, it came into focus that there _was _something in her hands—a large green frog or something. Was that what she was talking to? Flynn supposed it was at least normal to talk to one's pets, especially if she had been isolated and hadn't had much opportunity for normal interaction. If she really had been living nearby, she must have been pretty isolated, because he was sure that he had never seen her until tonight. "I'm back," he said, setting down the plate of food on the table beside her and pouring the glass full of water. "What's that?" he asked, referring to the creature in her hands.

The thing scurried up her arms and perched on her left shoulder, glaring out at Flynn. Maybe it was only because she had just been talking to it that he anthropomorphized the creature, but Flynn thought its look was almost distrustful.

"Oh!" Rapunzel exclaimed. "This is Pascal, my chameleon. He was hiding before."

"Were you talking to him?" Flynn asked, sitting down in his chair again.

She nodded, taking a bite of the chicken. "I haven't had anyone else to talk to since my mother... well..." She trailed off, her eyes growing watery, and looked down at her plate.

Flynn understood at once. "She passed away?" he said gently.

Rapunzel nodded, putting a grape into her mouth.

"And then you were left alone... until the food ran out," he said, almost to himself. "So what were you planning to do? Where are you headed?"

"I don't know. I thought about going to the kingdom," she said, "only I don't really know how to get there, and the men in the Snuggly Duckling weren't helpful."

Flynn blanched at the thought of small, slight Rapunzel by herself in that place. "You've been to the Snuggly Duckling already?" he said tightly.

She nodded. "They wouldn't let me stay there. I don't have any money, and they wouldn't take anything I did have as a trade. There were a lot of ruffians and thugs, too, and crass-looking women. They were all laughing and making fun of me, so I left."

"You don't need to go in there alone. It can be a dangerous place, especially at night. The daytime crowd isn't as bad. I hope nobody harmed you," Flynn said. He wasn't sure why, but the thought of her alone in that place made him feel protective. However, Rapunzel shook her head, and Flynn could tell that she was not lying. He relaxed a little bit. "So, what were you thinking about doing in... well, it's not a kingdom anymore, actually."

She glanced up quizzically at this. "What do you mean, it's not a kingdom anymore?"

"The King and Queen stepped down."

She frowned. "Oh," she said, sounding almost deflated. "So they don't live there now?"

"Nope. Why?"

Rapunzel bit her lip. "I don't know... I just thought I might have seen them before, a long time ago, and I thought I might try to find out if they could help me."

Flynn wanted to laugh. Rapunzel really had grown up isolated if she honestly thought she could just go asking for an audience with rulers on the basis of some vague memory, let alone asking them to help her. What a naïve thing to think. However, he managed to avoid laughing at her as he replied. "Well, they used to mingle with the people of Corona all the time, so you might _have _seen them before. But they can't help anyone now." He felt vaguely guilty about saying this even as the words tumbled from his lips, but he couldn't quite stop himself.

Rapunzel looked disappointed, nodding resignedly and finishing the last few bites of food.

"So," Flynn continued quickly, "what's your last name, Rapunzel?"

Her face turned pink—as did the frog or chameleon or whatever it was, most unnervingly to Flynn, as if the thing could understand him. He tried to ignore this.

"I don't know," she said, sounding deeply embarrassed. "My mother never told me."

He frowned. "Did you ever know your father?"

She shook her head. "I don't know who he was."

Flynn thought about this. Most likely, he thought, she was somebody's illegitimate child, if she had grown up with only a mother and didn't know anything about her father or even her own last name. Also, he thought, she had come from an isolated environment—as if her mother had been shamed over something and shunned by polite society. Yes, that was likely the case. As for seeing the King and Queen, Flynn now figured that was probably a mistaken identity in her memory.

One thing was clear. Rapunzel would be far better off, he had decided, staying in this house for the time being. He couldn't help but think that this was very fortuitous that she had come here tonight. She seemed to be completely unprotected in the world, with no one to miss her or go looking for her, and nothing in particular that she intended to do herself now that her vague plan of going to Corona had been shot down. She also seemed to be a nice person and pretty trusting—and, he suspected, very loyal once she got to know someone well. Flynn was pretty good at reading people, and the fact that she had opened up to him so quickly boded well on that score. The wheels in his brain were turning, as were other instincts in him, and he was already starting to form a plan—a plan that, if it worked, would eliminate the necessity of going to the Snuggly Duckling and picking up women when he didn't even want to just so that when he _did _want to, he would be considered desirable. It would be much nicer, he thought, to have the same woman around all the time, someone he could trust, and he decided that an unprotected woman like Rapunzel would be the only sort he could manipulate into that sort of arrangement. Besides, he had to admit that he found her highly attractive in her own right.

"Well," he said, getting up, "I'd love to have you here for as long as you need a place to stay."

"Really?" she said, glancing up at him with disbelieving eyes—but a smile on her face. He grinned back at her, nodding and winking. She blushed.

The lizard thing was glaring very distrustfully at him, however, and he decided that he needed to make an exit from this room before he started imagining too much else about that creature. "I'm going to go and get that parcel that you brought," he said, heading for the door, but before he could reach it, she had sprung up out of her chair. The lizard leaped onto her shoulder.

"I can get it," she exclaimed, pushing ahead.

Immediately his suspicions were raised, but he tried to shove them aside. "No, I insist," he said. "It's heavy. I'll carry it."

She bit her lower lip. "But... there are some things in it... please be careful, Flynn. There are some sentimental things in there that I don't want to be damaged."

He regarded her with an even look. "Why don't you take them out, so you won't have to worry?" he said, trying to put a kindly tone in his words. In truth, he wanted to see what she was talking about and verify that she was telling the truth.

"All right."

He opened the door, and together they walked into the hallway. Rapunzel pushed forward to where the parcel lay on the floor and untied the string around it. She opened it up, felt around inside it, and removed two items—a dark vase or urn of some sort, and a large canvas. Clutching these two items with her thin hands, she drew back and waited for Flynn to tie off the parcel again and lift it up. He carried it up the stairs with Rapunzel in tow.

"What have you got there?" he asked. He was relieved that, apparently, she really did have some things that she was worried about, and it wasn't just a ruse to keep him from seeing the contents of the parcel, but he wondered why she was concerned about these objects in particular.

"Oh, it's a portrait of my mother," she said. "And this... well... I can make pottery."

He felt an immediate curiosity about the painting. "Did you paint the portrait?"

"Yeah."

"I'd be interested in seeing it," he said as they reached the top of the stairs. He turned around and smiled at her.

"All right," she said shyly.

He pushed open the door to his bedroom and gestured for her to come in. Tentatively, uneasily, she did so, setting down the urn—which he could see was sealed at the top—and portrait as he was setting down the parcel. She leaned the painting against the wall and stepped back from it so that he could get a look at it. When he did, he practically jumped out of his skin.

The woman in the painting was reasonably attractive, with pitch-black curly hair. She was painted wearing a crimson gown that seemed to Flynn to be at least three centuries out of style, which struck him as very strange—though he was not an expert in women's fashion, he had certainly never seen anyone dressed like this except in illustrations of storybooks set in medieval times—but what really made his skin crawl were the woman's eyes. Cold, icy gray, they were painted in such a way that made them appear alive, as if they could somehow follow one around the room, staring at him no matter where he was. The woman herself bore an arrogant, knowing expression on her face. It was extraordinary painting, Flynn decided, and he told Rapunzel so.

She smiled shyly. "Thank you," she said. She hovered around the parcel. "Flynn, do you mind if I take out the rest of my things?"

"Go ahead," he said, though he wasn't quite minding his own words. He was too fixated on that picture and those eyes. He didn't want to look at them, they were so creepy to him, but it seemed somehow even creepier to think of looking away from that thing. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn't help but feel as if he was actually being stared at.

She opened the parcel and took out two more dresses, some undergarments, three books, and a box of paints. Flynn couldn't believe that this was all she owned. She sure wasn't going to get very far in Corona with nothing but this. No wonder no one at the Duckling had wanted to barter with her.

When Rapunzel was finished unpacking, she picked up the empty cloth and shook it out. She glanced up at him, biting her lower lip again. Flynn had already figured out what that expression meant: She had something that she wanted to say, but was hesitant to do so.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "It's just..."

"Just what?"

"I hate imposing on your hospitality like this," she got out. "I mean... I feel bad just coming in here, eating your food, and going to bed immediately."

"Oh," Flynn said with a smirk that made Rapunzel blush. "Well, would you rather stay up a bit longer? We can get to know each other better."

She nodded. "I'd like that."

Flynn led her over to the empty sofa in the bedroom and sat down, pointedly gesturing for her to sit next to him. She hesitated for a bit longer before taking her seat. He threw an arm around her shoulders. She flinched at first but quickly warmed up to the sensation of touch, involuntarily moving closer to him.

"So, Flynn—is this where you grew up?"

Immediately a wall seemed to rise up in his mind. "Sorry, I don't do back story," he said quickly.

She raised an eyebrow, clearly not satisfied with this non-answer. He shook his head again. "Please?" she said, her eyes widening.

He sighed. If he really intended to keep her here—and he did—then he would have to tell her this information anyway, and that look that she was giving him was awfully persuasive. "Oh, all right," he said reluctantly. "No, I didn't grow up here. I bought this house a year ago. I'm... an orphan," he admitted.

"Oh," she said, looking down. "I'm sorry. It's a really nice house, though," she added, as if to change the subject away from anything too sad.

He nodded. "What about your old house? Where did you live?"

"There was this clearing in the forest," she said. "It's very well hidden, but my... house... was, and is, in there."

Something occurred to Flynn. "Maybe we could go out there tomorrow, if it's stopped raining, and get some more of your stuff," he suggested.

She looked up at him, eyes shining. "That'd be nice," she said softly. He smiled gently at her. She gazed back at him for a moment before looking away and biting her lip again, her brow furrowing.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Why are you being so nice to me?" she blurted out. "I mean, you barely know me."

He looked down at his lap. He couldn't give her the real answer to that, he knew. That would totally derail his plans for her. He had to say something that would further his private agenda.

"Hey, not everyone is like the thugs in the inn," he said, reaching over with his free hand and stroking her cheek. Her eyes widened at this touch, but she didn't try to pull away. A faint smile formed on her lips.

"I guess not," she said softly, leaning into his hand.

Deliberately he drew away at once. It wouldn't do to overwhelm her immediately. He knew he had to make her desire his touch, and to do that, he had to withhold it calculatedly. Sure enough, as the warmth of his hand left her cheek, she frowned oh-so-slightly, obviously missing the contact.

"So," he said, trying hard to keep the smugness out of his voice, "you paint, you make pottery, you raise chameleons—"

"I've only had Pascal," Rapunzel corrected with a smile. "I don't raise them."

"Nuance," Flynn said, grinning back at her. "Anyway, what else can you do?"

She colored faintly, still smiling. "Well, I can sew," she said. She began ticking off talents on her fingers. "Make candles, knit, bake, cook, play the lute..."

Flynn was surprised. He had intended to compliment whatever she said whether he was truly impressed or not, but this _was _impressive. "You must be very talented," he said, eyes wide.

"Oh, I'm sure it's nothing special," she said.

He shook his head in amazement at her modesty. "It's definitely special," he said. "I mean, just the painting alone... that portrait of your mom is just incredible. I wish I could do something like that." He suddenly stopped speaking. Where had that last comment come from? He hadn't intended to say that...

"Oh, I'm sure you can do all sorts of things yourself," she said.

Flynn wanted to smirk again. Yes, he certainly could, as he intended to show her... but he realized that was _not _what she meant. "I don't really have any hobbies except reading... and doing a little writing," he said.

"Oh, I like to read too," she said.

He remembered the three books that had come out of her parcel. "I hope you've had more to read than just the books you brought," he said.

"My mother had more that she sometimes brought out for me to read," Rapunzel said, "but I don't know where she kept her books. I looked all over the tower—the house, I mean—for them before I left, but I never found them."

"Well, we can look for them when we go out there."

Rapunzel beamed gratefully at him, her green eyes sparkling. "Thank you so much," she said. She scooted right next to him on the couch so that they were almost touching.

Flynn could hardly contain the satisfaction he was feeling. He let the arm that had been draped around her shoulders fall down her back and settle around her waist. She drew in her breath, clearly enjoying the sensation, and leaned into him.

They continued to talk for another half hour, primarily about Rapunzel's background. The more he heard, the stranger it sounded. She let it slip that, apparently, her mother had never once allowed her to set foot outside the place they had lived, a fact that Flynn found absolutely bizarre—and horrifying to his renegade's sensibilities. The mother herself left the place frequently, returning with supplies for the two of them, but Rapunzel had no idea what her mother did or how she earned money. Flynn thought back to the mother's supposed stash of books and proposed the idea to Rapunzel that perhaps they had come from a circulating library and had to be returned, but Rapunzel shook her head, insistent that her mother had written her name in the volumes—indeed, that some of them had been forbidden to her and were always locked away when her mother was out, but that she had caught a glimpse of one once that was filled with her mother's own inked notes. Apparently there had been dozens of books that the mother brought in and out of the tower—for, in another strange revelation, Rapunzel had said that they lived in a seventy-foot-tall tower in the clearing—but that none of these books were anywhere to be found after the mother had died. Flynn did not know what to make of that. As Rapunzel related this to him, he couldn't help but let his gaze drift uneasily over to that creepily realistic portrait she had painted.

Needless to say, Rapunzel was now very open with Flynn, for the most part, though he could tell that there were some topics that she didn't want to talk about. Her mother's death was one of them. He didn't blame her for that, but he got the distinct impression that there was something highly unusual and especially traumatic about it, though he couldn't put his finger on what it might be. Apparently, too, they had quarreled violently before the death and had not made up. That had to be hard, he thought. At least when his own parents had died of the plague, he'd had the chance to say goodbye to them, and he told her so. That subject brought him awfully close to confessing to her how he had acquired the funds to pay for the house, but when she asked him what he did, he merely said that he had sold some valuables and now lived off interest.

Finally, though, Rapunzel fell silent, leaning against him still. She was definitely physically demonstrative, something that he liked very much. Their fingers were now intertwined. Much to his surprise, Flynn actually _felt _legitimately intimate with her after this long, personal conversation. He had never particularly cared about the background of anyone else before, but then, he supposed that he had never formed the specific intentions for anyone else that he had formed for Rapunzel either. Interestingly, he was pretty sure that knowing so much more about her made her more desirable to him.

That thought reminded him of what he meant to do. Slowly, deliberately, he stood up, helping her up with him. He began steering her toward the bed.

She glanced uneasily at him as he started to take off his doublet. "Flynn, what are you doing?" she asked. He merely raised an eyebrow in response and winked at her. She opened her mouth in surprise. Her eyes widened, and her face turned bright pink.

Without a word, he pulled off his doublet and began to work on his boots, smirking up at her from time to time as he did so. She stood there nervously, staring at him, and glanced briefly back at the chameleon that now rested on the back of the sofa. It was asleep. She turned back to him and continued to watch as he took off his clothes. Finally, her own fingers made their way to the laces of the bodice that she was wearing. Fumblingly, nervously, she untied the top and loosened the laces before slipping it over her head. When she had it off completely, she noticed that he was staring at her with blatant desire. She had never had anyone look at her like that before and didn't know what to make of it. It was certainly flattering...

Now wearing nothing but his pants, he stood up and silently shuffled over to her, standing behind her. His hands found their way to the loose material of her gown and quickly, delicately, pulled it down her shoulders. She shivered at his touch and instinctively covered her bare breasts with her hands when her chest was exposed. The material pooled at her feet, and she stood in front of him, trembling, in nothing but her drawers. He leaned in and kissed her lightly on the side of her face. That was all it took. She turned around to face him, still covering herself. At once he slipped one hand behind her head and the other around her waist, his fingers slipping into the waistband of her drawers. He drew her in and pressed his lips against hers. Her eyes popped wide open, but she couldn't help herself; this felt _so nice _and she was so flattered that he liked her this much. She parted her lips for him and instinctively let her hands fall away from her chest to bring his head closer.

She felt herself falling onto the bed with him and instantly found herself underneath him as soon as they hit the mattress. He smirked at this as he broke away from the kiss and unbuckled his pants.

Rapunzel did not know a whole lot about "carnal lusts" and "relations," but she did know the basics about the subject, and she knew enough to realize what he was doing. She wasn't sure whether she should permit this... but then, she supposed, he _had _offered to let her stay there as long as she needed to, and he had also offered to go and get her other belongings out of the tower—and, no doubt, bring them into his own house. She couldn't help but think that he might want her to stay there permanently, and now that she knew there was no point in going to Corona to try to talk with the royal family, she wasn't sure what else she could do. Anyway, she kind of wanted to stay here. Flynn was nice, she definitely liked him, and she was sure that he liked her... yes, she decided, this was all right. She didn't protest when he threw off his trousers and began to slide down her drawers, completely exposing her to him.

Flynn, in the meantime, had decided that he probably didn't need to use the waxed linen sheath that he normally used. He didn't like the thing, but he didn't dare go without it on his Snuggly Duckling escapades. However, Rapunzel was surely a virgin, which meant there was no risk of disease with her, and as for pregnancy... well, he knew of a book in his library about medicinal herbs, including some that could be used for regulation of fertility. If she stayed with him, that's what they would do. "I don't suppose you've ever done this before," he said as he tossed the thin white undergarments aside. She shook her head. "Well," he continued, leaning in and giving her another kiss, "it might hurt. Just... try to stand it, because it will get better." He winked at her.

She sucked in her breath hard as he slid into her. It did hurt—a lot—but she tried not to show too much pain. This must have worked, she thought, because he merely glanced briefly at her with a look of concern and puzzlement before immediately starting to move. That hurt more... but as he continued, the pain started to go away, and sure enough, this did start to feel really good. She wrapped her legs around his waist, prompting another smirk from him.

Several minutes later, he was panting and gasping above her. His movements were abrupt and ragged. She was feeling considerably more pleasure too, but she wasn't quite at the point of desperation that he obviously was—and, when he finally let out a cry, released into her, and collapsed on top of her, she couldn't help but wonder if there was supposed to be more to this. She felt unfinished somehow, as if the pleasure was supposed to have led up to something that didn't happen.

Flynn, however, didn't seem to be aware of it. He was barely awake now. He rolled off her and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her close. "Good night," he murmured behind closed eyes, kissing her sloppily on the cheek.

In spite of the vague feeling of disappointment that filled her, she smiled at this gesture. She turned onto her side and nestled against his chest. It suddenly hit her that she too was very tired... After all, she had walked all the way from the tower in pouring rain, carrying that parcel of books, dresses, paints, that urn, and her mom's picture. And if the weather cooperated with them, she would be making that same trip in reverse tomorrow.


	3. A Search and a Recovery

**Chapter Three: A Search and a Recovery**

* * *

Flynn woke up the next morning to an empty bed and the feeling of something sticky in his ear. He noticed the latter first.

"Gah!" he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright, suddenly very much awake. Out the corner of his eye, he saw a smallish green blur disappearing into the pile of female clothing that lay on the floor. His ear felt wet and cold inside, a very unpleasant sensation. What had the creature been up to, sticking its tongue in his ear? And why? He'd never heard of a reptile behaving that way. It was utterly revolting. He tried not to think about the fact that his ear canal now contained chameleon saliva...

Flynn shook his head in disgust. Now that _that _thought had entered his head, he had to do something about it. He opened the drawer to his nightstand and took out a handkerchief, which he promptly used to try to dry out his ear. At last he noticed the emptiness of his bed. A frown crossed his face. The girl, Rapunzel, was clearly somewhere in the house still, since her pet and her possessions were still here, but he had gone to sleep hoping—and expecting—to wake up with her next to him. If she was a naturally early riser, that probably wouldn't happen too much.

Disappointed, he got out of bed and went over to his wardrobe to take out some clothes. As he walked across the bedroom, the painted canvas propped up against the wall caught his eye. The sable-haired woman in her medieval robe leered arrogantly at him, the disturbingly realistic eyes seeming to follow him around the room still, making him hurry to the wardrobe so that he wouldn't feel like the painting was staring at him naked for too long. He was still quite impressed with Rapunzel's artistic ability, but as for the painting itself, he decided that he did not like having this thing in his bedroom and resolved to tell her that it had to be put somewhere else.

His gaze shifted slightly to the urn or vase that Rapunzel had set down next to the painting. He hadn't paid much attention to that last night, having been so struck by the portrait, but now he noticed that it was solid black except for a crimson brocade design near the top that, he was pretty sure, exactly matched the shade of red on the portrait figure's gown. It was really a simple piece, he thought, compared to the painting work that Rapunzel was so obviously capable of... but come to think of it, he didn't really like this object much either. Perhaps it was just the dark coloration of it and the fact that it was sitting next to the creepy painting, but Flynn felt a chill curl up his spine at this object too—a vaguely sinister aura about it. He would ask Rapunzel to put this somewhere else too, he decided.

Fully dressed, Flynn quickly left the bedroom and headed downstairs to the little dining nook. There she was, sitting at the table primly eating a slice of buttered bread. She was wearing a different dress from the one that she had shown up in, and as he moved closer and pulled out a chair to sit down, it crossed his mind that her clothes really didn't flatter her. They made her look like a rather young girl, though she had told him last night that she had just turned eighteen a week before.

"Good morning," Rapunzel said cheerily. She cast her bright green eyes shyly up at his face. She didn't seem to be too bothered by her memories of last night, just slightly embarrassed.

"Morning," he said. "Did you sleep well?"

She nodded around a mouthful of bread, but the look of cheerfulness faded from her face at this question. Flynn wondered why and suspected she wasn't being entirely honest, but he supposed it was no surprise if she had had a nightmare. The girl had recently lost her mother, after all.

"Well," he said, "I said last night that we could go to your old home and bring back anything you wanted if the weather permitted... so since it's nice and sunny, are you still interested?"

She looked up at him again. "Yes," she said. "That would be wonderful." Her voice, however, did not match her words. There was no enthusiasm.

"What's wrong?"

She sighed. "I don't know. I left the tower with the intention of going to the kingdom. I'm still not sure who, or what, I remember that I thought were the King and Queen of Corona... but I don't suppose it matters. It probably had something to do with my hair."

"Your hair?" he asked.

Rapunzel turned deep red. She stared at her now empty plate as she spoke. "My hair... um, it used to be really long, and Mother said that people were very interested in it when I was little."

He had absolutely no idea what to say to that. "That's... odd," he finally said.

Her gaze was still fixed on her plate. She didn't seem to respond to his statement, even nonverbally. They stayed silent for a little while. Then, uncomfortable with the lack of conversation, Flynn spoke again.

"Your tower, then. Could you tell me how far away it is?"

She considered. "It took me a couple hours to make the walk, but I think I was going in circles part of the way."

He frowned at that. "You think you'll be able to retrace your path?"

"Oh no, Pascal will have to go along, but he can direct us. He has an excellent sense of direction."

_Pascal._ That name reminded Flynn of his unpleasant awakening at the hands—or tongue—of the creature. He did not want it to happen again, and he decided then and there to do something about it. "About 'Pascal,'" he said. "He woke me up this morning by sticking his tongue in my ear. If that's what he's going to do, then he has to be put out of the bedroom at night."

Rapunzel laughed. "That's what he did? That's funny! He must have wanted you to get up. He's not accustomed to seeing people sleeping in. But I'll tell him not to do it."

Flynn shook his head slightly, not quite believing what he was hearing. Surely the animal couldn't actually understand instructions like that. Then again, he thought, the lizard did seem uncommonly humanlike in some ways. He decided not to question this remark right now. Maybe she did have some kind of special bond with her pet. Besides, he wanted to keep her happy. He was sure she wouldn't want to remain in a place where she was belittled and regarded as silly...

Flynn quickly scarfed down his breakfast. He scribbled a note for Attila, his cook, explaining that he would not be back until later in the day. Then he headed back to the bedroom to put on his boots and grab his cloak. Rapunzel followed him silently. When they went into the room, the chameleon was waiting at the foot of the bed as if he expected his owner to come back. He gave Flynn an unmistakable glare, actually narrowing his reptilian eyes at him, and leaped onto Rapunzel's shoulder. She grinned and waited as Flynn pulled on his boots.

Seeing her clothes reminded him of how the dresses that she owned made her look four or five years younger than she was. He gazed up at her and regarded her figure admiringly. She wasn't voluptuous, and in fact was on the thin side, but she had a womanly shape and no reason to hide it. He imagined her in green, a shade a hint darker than the green of her eyes, with black and gold trim. It would complement her dark hair well and bring out the color of her eyes much better than pastel pinks and purples. He decided that the next time he went to the city, he would bring her along and have some age-appropriate dresses made for her. And if his primary motivation was to dress her to appeal to himself, well, she would still end up looking more beautiful than she did now, so that couldn't hurt anything.

At last they were both ready to go. Flynn took out the small hand-pulled cart that he owned, hauling it behind him as they left the property and headed into the forest. The chameleon Pascal remained on Rapunzel's shoulder, and he actually did seem to be pointing in specific directions from time to time. Rapunzel was following his lead, and Flynn was following her, hoping all along that they weren't just being led deep into the forest far from their destination.

However, after about an hour and a half of steady walking, they came upon what appeared to be a dead end. It was a patch of wood with a stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere, with a curtain of vines and a wall of rock. However, Rapunzel herself at last seemed to recognize this spot, and she quickly strode forward and pulled aside the vines. Light poured through the opening, though Flynn noticed at once that it was not the bright sunlight of the dawn. Clouds were gathering overhead.

Flynn came forward, sensing that this was the place, and peered through the vines. What he saw almost took his breath away. It was a majestic, picturesque clearing in the wood, and right in the middle of it was the tall stone tower that Rapunzel had talked about. He began walking out into the clearing, heading for the base of the tower, where an open archway marked the entrance to the place. The stone, Flynn noticed, looked old—very, very old. It was covered in moss in places, and the overall look was of weather-beaten centuries. He wondered how this tower had come to be, who had built it in some far-distant dark age, and for what purpose.

When they reached that opening, a slight cry escaped from her, drawing his attention away from the tower and its ancient stonework. He glanced over at her. A look of pain filled her face, and that lizard of hers was turning blue before his eyes, as if it were trying to match the mood she suddenly found herself in. He felt bad about it; this was presumably where her mother had died.

Suddenly he realized that they might very well be walking in to a place containing a dead body. That didn't especially bother him, but it was her mother. Gazing uncertainly at her, he ducked under the stone archway with her, leaving the cart behind and stepping over a fat round stone in the center of the floor that had been carved with an intricate and vaguely sinister design. He wondered at that but decided not to ask Rapunzel about it; the carving on the stone looked every bit as old as the stonework itself, so it would have been put there long before her time or her mother's. His curiosity about the original purpose of this tower returned. _When I go into Corona to get those dresses made for her, I think I'll stop by the library too and research the history of this place,_ he thought.

They began to ascend a narrow, winding spiral staircase. Even the dimmed light of the overcast sky vanished in that gloom, leaving them in near-darkness as they climbed.

"I was wondering something," he said hesitantly. "Your mother... what happened? I mean, where was she buried? If you don't mind my asking," he added.

Another cry escaped from her. "She, um... well... she wasn't," Rapunzel stammered.

He fell silent at that. He had been able to extract very little information from her about how her mother had died, and now she had just confessed that there had been no burial. "Her body isn't in _there, _is it?" he asked anxiously. He really didn't want to have to dig a grave out here, but if they were going into a place where a corpse lay, he felt that he would have to do so. The image suddenly filled his mind of Rapunzel remaining inside this tower with nothing but her chameleon for company, gradually depleting the food supply, sweeping the place clean methodically, talking to no one but the animal, while her mother's body began to decompose somewhere inside the tower. The idea sent a chill down his spine.

"Oh, no," Rapunzel said quickly. "Definitely not."

"Did she die while she was away?" he asked gently. They were almost at the top of the stairs. He could see a square opening up ahead, and apparently light was coming through the windows of the tower, because it was growing less dark.

Rapunzel shook her head quickly.

Flynn decided not to ask her any more questions about her mother's death. He supposed that, if she was telling him the truth—and he would find out soon enough if she was lying about there being no body in here—then someone had apparently taken the body out of the tower and perhaps cremated it. Maybe Rapunzel herself had even brought it out of the tower and left it somewhere in the woods.

At last they stepped out of the cramped passage and into what appeared to be a living room. Flynn gazed around the room as his eyes adjusted to the light again. The first thing he noticed was that the walls were painted from floor to ceiling in a highly stylized manner rather unlike the realistic style of Rapunzel's mother's portrait. The subject matter of the paintings was mostly cheerful—farm animals, swirls, floral patterns, and the occasional girl with long yellow hair—but in the gloomy light of the cloudy day, the effect was vaguely creepy anyway. Flynn didn't like standing here and gaping at this. He wanted something to do to take his mind off it.

"Why don't you gather up what you want, make a pile of it around this opening, and then we'll look for those books of your mom's," Flynn suggested.

"All right," she said weakly. He realized that she too had been gazing around the place, even though she had been in here just yesterday. She quickly scampered up a dark staircase in the back. He watched her disappear behind a curtain that was draped over a doorway at the top of the stairs. That, he supposed, had been her room. He glanced over at another room. A dark red bedspread caught his eye. This must have been her mother's bedroom. He decided to have a look. If there _was _a body, it would probably be in here.

In that room he noticed a small table with a drawer. He opened the drawer and saw a sharp, deadly-looking dagger. An inexplicable chill passed over him at the sight, and he slammed the drawer shut at once. He couldn't explain it, but something about that particular blade really bothered him, and he didn't want to look at it.

In spite of what Rapunzel had claimed about her mother having written her name in all these supposed books that she brought inside, and in spite of his own promise to help her look for them, Flynn still did not believe that the cache of dozens of books really existed. Rapunzel had probably seen library books with a bookmark or sheet of paper with the signature, he figured. However, the story about the one forbidden book—the one she had illicitly discovered was filled with her mother's handwritten notes—was a bit more intriguing. That, he thought, might very well be a book that the mother had owned. It was clear from the smell—merely a bit musty—that Rapunzel had been telling the truth and there was no corpse inside this tower, at least, so he didn't have to worry about that anymore.

He thought about where he might want to hide something if he felt that he needed to. It was quite easy to do so, since that was how he had thought for so many years anyway. The bed caught his eye once more. Smiling grimly, he threw back the dark red bedspread and lifted up the mattress.

His notion was not wrong. A leather-bound book _was _there. He reached for it quickly, pulling it out as the mattress fell back into place, and held it carefully in his hands. Rather than being professionally bound by a printer, he noticed that it was held together by three tarnished silver rings. He also noticed that the leather appeared to be very old indeed, bearing cracks in several places, and that the pages in between looked old and brittle, at least the pages on top.

"Rapunzel, I've found a book in your mother's old room," he called out. He heard a gasp of surprise.

Gingerly he opened the top cover and peered inside. The first page in the book was thin, brittle, and very yellowed. The content was obviously handwritten, and the hand was almost unreadable to Flynn. It was the script of another era. The heavily accented letters, ascenders and descenders on letters that were not now written with them, and occasional letter that was not even in common use anymore all marked it as a script of the medieval period. It was with difficulty that Flynn made out the word _"daemonia."_

That particular word would have been unsettling in its own right, but Flynn's attention was immediately drawn to the strange, almost otherworldly symbols that appeared here and there on the page. These were absolutely not letters, even obsolete ones. Some of them gave him a definite sense of unease, though he could not explain what it was that was so disturbing about them. There were some designs with a Celtic look, though far more sinister than any Gaelic symbols _he _had ever seen in books... but on the whole, they were evocative of ancient characters from Egypt or Arabia or some place in that part of the world, he decided. He looked away from the symbols and back at the old-fashioned words, trying to decipher more, when Rapunzel suddenly came bounding into the room.

A squeal escaped from her, and she dashed over to where Flynn held the fragile manuscript. Before he could make out anything else on that page, she snatched it out of his hands.

Somewhat affronted, he turned to her with a raised eyebrow. "You'd better be more careful than that," he said edgily. "It's very old, whatever it is."

"I'm sorry," she said penitently. "It's just... this is exciting. Where did you find it?"

"Under the mattress."

"Oh, I didn't even think of looking there," she exclaimed. She clutched the old manuscript to her chest and grinned from ear to ear.

In spite of himself, Flynn couldn't help but smile back to see her so thrilled at this find. He wondered if she had had any luck with her own search. "Do you need help gathering anything out of your old room?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No, thanks. Flynn!" she exclaimed excitedly, her attention still on the manuscript. "You know what? Last night I had a dream with my mother in it, and she told me to come to the tower and look for things! And now you've found this."

Flynn smiled ruefully at her. "Well, we had mentioned that we were going to do it... and of course you miss her... so it's no surprise, really. It was on your mind."

She giggled. "Maybe, but I like to think that she was sending me a message through the dream."

Flynn didn't have the heart to continue with his skeptical analysis of the dream. Rapunzel clearly missed her mother very much, and if she drew comfort from this idea, then let her. _Besides, I would not trust anyone who "sent a message" to somebody to look for a manuscript full of weird symbols,_ a tiny voice in his head whispered, but he quickly dismissed that thought. It was probably just a transcription of something, he thought. There was no harm in a bundle of old papers...

Rapunzel bounded off toward her old bedroom once more, and Flynn did not hear anything from her for a while. Shortly afterward, he finished scouting around her mother's old bedroom. He had found nothing else of literary interest. He had, however, discovered a wooden box full of glass vials such as one might find in a scientific laboratory, but curiously, these too had a look of antiquity to them. The design of the vials seemed unnecessarily ornate, even grotesque. They were clouded with age and use, and the glass was stained faintly in the bottom. He was surprised to find something like this without a book of chemistry to accompany it, but he quickly realized that the woman could have obtained such books from the library of Corona. He picked up the box and carried it to the hole in the floor that led to the dark stone staircase. These vials looked quite old, and Flynn thought it possible that he could sell them to the museum in the former kingdom.

Rapunzel was setting down a much larger box when he ambled up. He smiled at her as he set down the box of glassware and peered inside Rapunzel's box. There were lots of different types of objects in the box: crafts that Rapunzel had almost certainly made herself, sewing supplies, small pottery items, and several small canvases both painted and empty. No books.

He drew back from the side of the box and instantly met a pair of wide green eyes. His heart gave a thump at the sight. She was really pretty, he thought... and besides, he hadn't kissed her or done anything else with her today. He _would _have given her another round of what they did last night, had she not gotten out of bed without him... On an impulse, he leaned over and took her face in his hands before she could move away. Her eyes grew somehow even wider, but he paid little attention to that and quickly pressed his lips against hers.

A half-moan, half-growl escaped her as he parted her lips and started to plunder her mouth. She clutched at his doublet almost helplessly, as if she needed to hold on to something or she would collapse at his feet. He felt smug at that idea. He generally had this effect upon women, but it was always satisfying to his ego to observe it happening.

At last he broke away from her, leaving her mouth red and _her _visibly flustered. He smirked at the sight. "Wait till we get back," he said seductively, raising an eyebrow meaningfully at her. She colored faintly, apparently embarrassed by the memories, and turned away at once, scampering into her mother's old room to resume gathering whatever she deemed valuable.

Satisfied with this reaction, Flynn picked up the box of glassware and began the descent down the dark staircase again. The cart was still waiting for him in the entranceway. He noted the same round stone in the middle of the floor, and was just setting down the box in the back of the cart, when something occurred to him.

The ornate, carved design in the middle of that stone had been in the manuscript he had found. He was sure of it. It had been one of the vaguely disturbing symbols scattered throughout the archaic text. A frown crossed his face at this realization. Yes, he decided, he would definitely have to do some research into this place the next time he went to the island.

When he reached the main floor of the tower again, Rapunzel was back, peering over the box as if unsure what to do with it. She still clutched the old manuscript against her chest. The chameleon had returned from wherever it had been, and it was perched on her shoulder once more, looking at her as if it too had no idea what to do. Flynn instantly guessed the situation and lifted it up for her, descending onto the narrow spiral staircase once more. Rapunzel followed behind him.

He set the large box in the back of the cart and peered out at the sky. The clouds that had been gathering all day were now thick and heavy.

"I think we should head back," he said anxiously, gazing at the sky. "I didn't find any books other than that one, but we can look some other day if you want." He wasn't sure why he said this; having actually seen the tower and its rather small rooms, he could not imagine where a hoard of books could be secreted away. He was more convinced than ever that the books had come from a circulating library.

Rapunzel seemed disappointed too at this reminder, but she glanced briefly down at the leather-bound pile of papers and the disappointment fled her visage. "It's all right," she said. "We had better start, I agree. I don't want to get caught in rain again."

As they began the journey back, lightning occasionally lit up the sky, followed by threatening rumbles of thunder. The canopy of the forest already darkened the path in front of them, and it seemed to be getting darker by the minute from the heavy clouds. In addition to being alarmed that a bolt might strike a tree while they were under it, Flynn was rapidly becoming concerned that they would both get caught in rain. There was no point in fretting about it, though. If it happened, it happened. He did walk faster than he had before, even though the cart he was hauling was now loaded with two boxes, one of which was quite heavy.

Though they were walking rather quickly and the exertion was making them both breathe heavily, Flynn decided to ask Rapunzel a little more. He was growing very curious about her mother, and Rapunzel seemed to be reasonably well able to converse about how she had been in life, though she didn't want to talk about her death.

"I couldn't help but notice," he remarked, "your mother seemed to have had a fascination with old stuff. The vials I picked up are probably antiques... she had some kind of interest in a medieval manuscript... and you painted her in old-fashioned clothes."

Rapunzel frowned. "I did? That was just her favorite gown, though all of them looked like that, just different colors and patterns on the fabric. I didn't know it was old-fashioned. She brought back patterns for me to sew my own clothes, and I just thought it was because she wanted my clothes to look different from hers."

"Then maybe she just liked the look," he said helplessly. "What about the glassware, though? And the old papers?"

Rapunzel looked down at her feet. "I've never seen the old papers before, so I don't know, but she always used that glassware," she said in a quiet voice.

"What did she—"

"I don't know exactly what she did with it. We didn't ever need medicine," she said in a strangely evasive tone that made Flynn glance at her sharply, but she kept going. "She wouldn't ever let me see what she was doing with those old bottles and things, though it smelled dreadful. She would just bring one of her books—the ones I wasn't allowed to see—into her room, close the door, and do her chemistry, I guess."

"I don't know why she wouldn't have allowed you to see chemical books," he said in surprise.

Rapunzel looked down. "She had a lot of strange rules for me."

Flynn recalled that the woman had apparently not allowed her daughter to leave the tower for years and years. Yes, she had definitely had strange rules for her.

At last they arrived back at the manor house and unloaded the cart. The rain had not yet started, to Flynn's immense relief. He was hungry now after all that, and to his pleasure, he smelled the delightful scent of a pot of stew that Attila had undoubtedly made while they were gone and left to simmer for them.

Taking Rapunzel's hand possessively, he led her back to the kitchen. It was a separate unit from the main building, attached by a narrow passageway of stone that was completely undecorated even on the inside. It was so that if the kitchen caught fire, it would have a harder time spreading to the main house. Flynn and Rapunzel walked into the kitchen and over to the large hearth, where an iron pot of beef stew was cooking. Rapunzel's stomach gave a rumble.

"Hungry?" Flynn asked teasingly. He went over to a cabinet and took out two bowls, handing one to her. There was no more bread or butter left in the main house, but Attila had baked some fresh loaves while he was here. Flynn took out two smaller saucers as well. They ladled out stew for themselves, cut slices of the freshly baked bread, and carried the plates into the dining nook. Flynn got out two crystal goblets from the china cabinet in that room and poured some water for the two of them.

To his disgust, she wanted to have her chameleon eat at the table with her, but he didn't like that idea, immediately thinking about insects for the creature's likely food source. However, Pascal ate fruit, she said, so he tentatively passed her a bunch of grapes to test that idea. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Pascal did snatch up the grapes with his tongue and eat them.

There was not much conversation during the meal because they were both so hungry, he couldn't help but peek across the table at Rapunzel from time to time. He admired her because she was attractive, but he also thought he genuinely liked her company. She seemed to be smart and was obviously very talented, and her unpretending nature was a pleasant change of pace from the usual types of women that he met. Once or twice, he happened to catch her eye. Evidently she was peering out at him regularly too. That didn't particularly surprise him, he thought arrogantly. He knew his own appeal... and besides, he remembered, he had given her food and shelter, taken her to bed, and had been her first time, so it was natural that she would feel attached to him. Her becoming attached to him was a good thing, he decided, since he wanted to keep her around anyway.

Shortly after they were finished eating, the rain that had been threatening to come all day finally began in earnest. It was a veritable deluge every bit as intense as the one from last night. Flynn gave silent thanks that they had not postponed their return journey out of some preposterous idea of looking for a hoard of books that they weren't going to find. Now that they were safe, warm, and most importantly, dry inside the house, he thought it was actually quite cozy to be holed up indoors with Rapunzel. With that thought, he headed back toward the front of the house where his study was.

Rapunzel stopped outside the door and regarded the two boxes they had brought back, which were still lying in the foyer. Neither she nor Flynn had felt like unpacking them yet. However, she wanted to look at that old manuscript. It was where she had left it, on top of everything else in the larger box, and she quickly picked it up and followed Flynn into the study.

He was settling down in his favorite armchair with the same book that he had tried to read the night before. When he saw what she was holding, he quirked a brow curiously at her. "Is it that interesting?" he asked.

She sat down across from him and put the manuscript in her lap, though she did not open it yet. "I just want to see if I can make it out," she said. "Mother found it interesting, at least."

"True."

He opened his novel and focused his gaze on that as if to read it, but in truth, he meant to convince Rapunzel that he was not looking at her—or that document in her lap. Sure enough, she shifted her gaze away from him and opened the leather cover. He sneaked a glance at her and noted that she bit her lip in puzzlement at the first page.

She frowned and turned to a section in the middle of the document. Flynn peeked over at her again, and at once felt surprise wash over him. He wasn't absolutely certain of it, since he could not get a close look, but he thought that the middle section looked more recent. The paper was not nearly as yellowed; that much was certain.

Whatever was on the middle pages was apparently not much easier for Rapunzel to read, however, because she frowned once more and turned towards the end of the book. A look of relief passed over her face at whatever she saw there. Thoroughly intrigued now, Flynn glanced quickly over again. His heart skipped a beat. There was no mistaking it; this section of the book was written on paper that looked almost brand-new, and he could even catch a glimpse of the handwriting. He wasn't close enough to make out anything that it said, but the general look of the hand was far more modern.

Rapunzel began reading this section intently, pretty much confirming to Flynn that it was written in a more modern style and script. The thought was somehow disquieting. He couldn't understand why the same handwritten manuscript would have been compiled over several different ages, dating back to at least four or five hundred years ago. Such long-running records typically would be associated with family records and genealogies that were supplemented by each new generation, but that did not explain the sinister symbols and the single word _"daemonia"_ that he saw on the first page.

At last he couldn't stand it any longer. Clearing his throat to get her attention, he looked over at her as she snapped her head away quickly—almost clandestinely—from the manuscript. "What sort of manuscript is it?" he asked. That, he thought, was a safe, reasonable question, not too prying.

She seemed to tense up at even that benign query, however. "It's kind of like a... I think it was something my mother read for her chemical experiments," she said, looking away from him as she answered. "And she made notes of her own. I recognize some of her handwriting."

That still seemed a little strange to Flynn, but he immediately recognized that he was not going to get anything more out of her. "Oh," he said. "Well... I'm glad you were able to find something with her writing." He paused, considering what to say next. "If you want me to help you decipher the older parts of it, I'd be happy to."

She drew in her breath nervously and shook her head. "Thanks—I mean that, thank you—but I think I'm all right with the newer parts. From what I have read so far, I think a lot of the older material is... inaccurate... or obsolete, you know, and I'll find what I need in the new part."

"What you _need?"_ he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Do you want to try some experiments of your own based on those papers?"

Rapunzel broke into a smile that, though clearly sincere and very open in contrast to the secretive manner she had heretofore had about the papers, seemed almost _too _happy to Flynn—almost unnaturally happy. "Yes," she breathed. "There is something in here that I _really, really _want to try soon, more than I have ever wanted anything." Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but her eyes seemed to glisten for a moment.

Flynn's eyebrow remained quirked at that effusion, but he was so relieved by the openness in her manner that he didn't question it. "Then I will gladly assist you in getting whatever you need," he said with a smile. "I was already planning to go to Corona soon, to visit the library and the dressmaker—oh, yes," he added as he watched her burst into an embarrassed smile at the implications. "We can stop at the chemist's too if you like, if whatever your mother did and recorded in there is that important."

"It is," Rapunzel said softly, looking down at her lap with a face that was growing increasingly pink. "It definitely is."


	4. An Interest and an Attachment

**Author's Note:** I've got a number of things to say here. First, thanks for the interest, especially Wolfram-and-Hart for his recommendation to the Tangled Fics blog.

This chapter should shed _some _light on some of the questions that have been raised in comments. I'm also placing a major card on the table, so to speak, and it will probably be possible to figure out what's going on now, though readers who know the story that this is based on have likely guessed what I'm doing anyway.

One comment mentioned the Necronomicon. The handwritten manuscript of chapter 3 is not that (it does have a Lovecraftian parallel, but not that), but the book will make its appearance soon enough. There is actually a very oblique reference to it in here.

And one last thing. Again, I apologize for the ending scene (though I have a feeling it will be quite appealing to some). There really is a purpose behind this selfish, domineering Flynn focused mainly on his own pleasure, and that purpose is not (entirely) BDSM fetishism.

* * *

**Chapter Four: An Interest and an Attachment**

* * *

Further questioning from Flynn did not elucidate exactly what the experiment that Rapunzel wanted to perform was, and he soon gave up trying to get details out of her. A suspicion was forming in his mind about the nature of that handwritten book, however, and if it was correct, then he would definitely want to encourage her in her interest in it. It had occurred to him that the book might be a collection of notes about alchemy. That, he thought, would account for the age of the first pages, the occult symbols, the chemical formulae that were apparently in it, the fact that some older parts were supposed to be "inaccurate" or "obsolete," and even Rapunzel's guarded aside that she and her mother had not bought medicine when they lived together. Flynn did not actually suppose that the Philosopher's Stone or Elixir of Life could really exist, but he _did _suspect there might be some wisdom and value in the old discipline—something that could potentially make them a lot of money if Rapunzel managed to create a potent medicine.

When at last Rapunzel closed the leather cover and headed out of the room to get her bath, Flynn suddenly recalled his discomfort that morning with the portrait and urn.

"Could you move them into the room at the end of the hallway?" he asked her as she paused in the doorway of the study. "In fact," he said, struck with a sudden idea, "that whole room can be your laboratory if you are serious about this."

She beamed. "Certainly," she said, rushing over to his chair in gratitude. "I would have wanted them there anyway if I used it as a laboratory. Thanks." She leaned over and gave him a light kiss on the forehead, startling him, but she had dashed out of the room—manuscript in hand—before he could rise from his seat and return the kiss.

She also moved the box of glassware into the laboratory, as Flynn discovered when he finally grew hungry again and set down his book. The box was gone from the hallway. He felt a pang of disappointment but chastised himself for it at once. The supplies belonged to her, after all; and if she _did _become successful at making whatever her mother had made, that would earn them a lot more money than he could have gotten from selling old flasks to a museum.

He walked quietly up the stairs to let her know it was time to eat. About halfway up, he noticed a light pattering behind him. Startled, he stopped and turned around. A small green chameleon was making its way up, following him, its eyes wide.

"Where have you been hiding?" he asked in surprise, stooping down to pick up the animal. He couldn't believe that the chameleon hadn't followed its owner. He was even more surprised when Pascal jumped gladly into his outstretched palms and scampered onto his shoulder—though he felt a bit of unease about the creature's situation, mainly regarding its tongue.

However, it turned out that this fear was unfounded, as he reached the designated room unmolested by reptile appendages. He walked into the small room, which was empty of all furniture except a pair of chairs, an empty bookcase, and a heavy mantelpiece. He noticed at once that the portrait of Rapunzel's mother had been placed above the mantel, its unnervingly realistic eyes glaring out malignly at the almost empty room. The black-and-crimson urn was placed in front of the unlit fireplace. Rapunzel was seated in one of the chairs, dressed in a loose dressing-gown, the hand-bound book in her lap. The other chair was right next to her, arranged as if for a tête-à-tête, though of course it was empty. _He _had not situated the furniture that way; Rapunzel herself must have done it when she came in here, though he could not imagine why. As he approached her, she gazed up at Flynn almost guiltily.

"It's time to eat," he said, heading over and gently taking the book out of her hands. He placed it in the other chair and took her hand as she stood up. Pascal leaped from his shoulder to hers, giving his owner a disapproving glare that rather surprised Flynn.

"All right," she said. A smile formed on her face as she went with him.

Flynn was not sure what made him do it, but he turned around slightly as they left the room. The portrait caught his eye, leering sinisterly at him, or so it seemed, casting an aura of undeniable malice over the whole room. Perhaps it was also the empty chair, but whatever it was, he did not want to leave the door open and allow those eyes to glare out into his house. Quickly he pulled the heavy door shut and continued with Rapunzel down to the first floor.

There was plenty of stew left, and it was even better for having simmered all day long. Rapunzel wolfed hers down greedily. Now that he had a stomach full of warm delicious food, his sense of unease had mostly dissipated. He regarded Rapunzel—and her intense hunger—with affection, as well as a certain smugness. She had been hungry before coming here, so of course she could eat anything she wanted, as much as she wanted, and he felt good about being the one to feed her and take care of this malnourishment from which she had been suffering.

At last she finished, however, and relaxed in her chair as she finally looked out contentedly at him. A slightly goofy smile formed on her pretty face.

He couldn't help but smile back. "You know," he remarked, "I was thinking that we should try to go to the city tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" she said in surprise.

He nodded. "I want to go by the dressmaker's and the library."

Her eyes sparkled. "Oooh, I'd like that."

"I thought you might," he said with a grin.

She gazed at him happily. A contented sigh escaped from her as she smiled. "You're a sweet person," she remarked. "I feel so lucky to have stopped here, at this house. I just felt like I should—as if I were being compelled to do so—as if I _needed _to."

Flynn could not help but smirk arrogantly at this representation of it. It was lucky for both of them that she had stopped. Flynn had not been much of a believer in fate, but he _had _been entertaining the idea that she had been "sent" there for his benefit, so for her to suggest such similar notions was amusing, and it reinforced the belief that was growing in his own mind.

"Maybe you did need to," he said, trying to sound gallant instead of arrogant. It must have worked, because Rapunzel colored faintly and the smile on her face somehow grew even wider as she looked down at her lap.

When they got up from the table, Rapunzel headed for the stairs again. Something in Flynn bristled at this sight. For some reason, he did _not _like the idea of her going up to that room and reading in an empty chair again under the watchful eye of her mom's picture. He reached out and gently took her arm. She stopped and turned around.

"Haven't you spent enough time in there today?" he said, trying not to sound too strict. "I hate to think of you up here by yourself. I've got plenty of books... why don't you come down to the study with me?"

She paused for a moment, considering. The room seemed to beckon... but Rapunzel blinked, gave him a quick eager nod, and took his arm. Relieved, he escorted her into the study and opened up a set of double doors from inside the room that led into another, nearly identically-shaped room—but this one was filled with bookshelves. Rapunzel's eyes grew wide.

"Oh!" she exclaimed in delight, immediately dashing into the small library. She stopped before the walls of shelves and looked from row to row, overwhelmed, unsure where to begin looking for a particular book to read.

Amused by her reaction, Flynn came up beside her. "Are you _quite _all right?" he teased. "Or should I get some smelling salts?"

She whirled around, beaming. "I'm fine—great, actually! I love books." She wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself, as if trying to release the joy she was clearly feeling.

"Well, you can look at anything in here that you want to," he said. "They're arranged by subject, and the novels are over there." He pointed at the wall nearest them. Rapunzel hesitated for a moment, her eyes scanning over a shelf along the far wall containing a variety of scientific authors, but finally decided on the shelf of fictional materials. Flynn returned to the study and picked up his own book.

Within a few minutes, Rapunzel came back into that room, clutching a volume that Flynn recognized at once as being a _very _scandalous romance. He had never read it in full, as it seemed to be oriented toward female readers, but it had belonged to his mother. Before he returned to this country with his ill-gotten wealth, he had made a detour to Britain to hunt down any scrap he could find that had once belonged to his parents. There had not been much; when the plague carried them away, most of their belongings had been sold at auction to pay debts, but the family that bought the tiny little house where the Fitzherberts had once lived gladly let him come in and take away the few items that had not been sold, which were stored in the attic. This novel had been one of them, and the very reason it had not been sold at a public auction was its scandalous nature. Flynn found it highly amusing that his mother—by all accounts, a proper, if dirt-poor, schoolteacher whose maiden name was Clara Willett—had owned such a book. He had also found a small parcel of letters from the two of them, a battered handkerchief that had belonged to his father (and namesake), and a poorly-painted miniature of the pair of them. He kept the three more personal artifacts locked in a cabinet, but this indecent novel he had shoved into the bookshelf with his other books.

As the evening progressed, he kept expecting to be drawn away from his own reading by shocked gasps and possibly expressions of outrage from his companion, but no such effusions interrupted him. Whenever he sneaked peeks at Rapunzel, he noticed the same thing, that she was wide-eyed and often blushing, but not morally shocked by anything she read. He recalled how readily she had allowed him to take her to bed the night before, however, and quickly concluded that even though she had been a virgin, her mother must not have instilled her with typical notions about relations—if any at all. Indeed, the look on Rapunzel's face most of the evening was one of plain curiosity.

He ducked back and smirked to himself at that idea. Yes, he could teach her a lot of things on that subject... Stifling a chuckle, he returned to his own novel, quickly becoming immersed in it as he stopped wondering at Rapunzel's reaction to her own material.

When at last he finished the book, he glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight. If they meant to go to the former kingdom tomorrow, they should get some sleep. He glanced at the chair where Rapunzel sat.

She had closed and bookmarked her novel and was sleeping peacefully in her chair, her pet chameleon curled up on top of the book.

He almost hated waking her up, she looked so peaceful, but he didn't want her to get a crick in her neck from sleeping like that. He walked over and gently nudged her awake.

"Oh," she mumbled, yawning. "What time is it?" Her eyes were bleary and her words were muffled by sleepiness.

"Late," he said. A feeling of disappointment was washing over him; after being deprived this morning, he had fully intended to give her a workout in bed tonight, but if she was in this state, that wouldn't be fair. She couldn't enjoy it like this. Flynn wondered why he was even worrying about such a thing when he had ample history of bedding drunk women with nary a hint of guilt, but somehow this seemed different to him. It was that Rapunzel genuinely liked him; that much was obvious. Hadn't she called him "sweet" at the dinner table? It wasn't true, he thought, but he saw no point in destroying the affection that he had apparently caused her to develop. Whether he was starting to form affectionate feelings for _her, _he did not care to contemplate.

"Oh," she mumbled again. She stood up, waking up Pascal, who scampered quickly up her dress and perched on her shoulder. She set the novel down on the seat and took Flynn's arm. Groggily she fumbled out of the room and up the stairs.

He unmade the bed and removed his doublet and boots before climbing in. Rapunzel followed suit, though in her case it was more _collapsing _into bed as her chameleon jumped off her shoulder, and immediately letting her eyelids flutter shut again as she hit the pillows. Before she fell asleep, though, she curled up against him and snuggled close. At that, all the selfish disappointment he had been feeling seemed to flee his mind. He smiled at her with a tenderness that, if he had seen himself in a mirror, would have shocked him. Snuffing out the candle, he threw an arm around her and quickly fell asleep.

* * *

The next morning he did not awake to a chameleon's tongue in his ear, but he once again woke up to an empty bed. That was starting to frustrate him, he thought as he stomped around the room and splashed himself down with water from his basin. He would have her tonight, he resolved, preferably after pulling off a flattering new dress—but that detail, he supposed, would depend on whether the dressmaker had anything suitable in a near-finished state.

After a quick breakfast, the two of them headed through the tiny wooded village in the direction of the former kingdom. They passed by the Snuggly Duckling and shortly thereafter a wooden dam. At last, when the sun was high in the sky, they reached the footbridge to Corona. Rapunzel's eyes seemed to light up at the sight of the populous island.

"Wow!" she exclaimed, her green eyes widening in pleasant surprise. He smiled indulgently at her. She had, he recalled, never seen anything like this before.

"Where are we going first, Flynn?" she asked eagerly.

Suddenly something occurred to him. "Uh," he said uneasily, "I thought we should go to the dressmaker's first... but before we go anywhere, there's something I should tell you."

She glanced up questioningly.

"I... would rather that you didn't call me Flynn while we're in the city," he said.

She frowned. "I don't understand."

"Eh, well... Corona and I have... something of a past," he said evasively, "and 'Flynn Rider' is not the most popular name to bandy about in there. Trust me, it would not do you any favors to talk about knowing me. I'd prefer that you call me Eugene. Eugene Fitzherbert."

She was still frowning. "Why? Which is your real name?" There was a hint of hurt in her voice.

He felt bad all of a sudden. Of course she would feel betrayed about not knowing his true _name_ of all things. He wished that he had told her at first. _–Wait, where did that come from?_

"Eugene," he admitted.

She bit her lip, breathing heavily. "Then why—?"

"I'll explain some other time," he said. "I'm sorry for not telling you earlier." He squeezed her hand, wondering at the fact that he was apparently feeling contrite over something, and something this simple. Or was it just that he was nervous that she would not want to be around him anymore?

She glanced up at him. "What about outside the city? What do you want me to call you at home?"

"Whichever you want," he said before he even knew what he was saying. His words surprised him, but he made no move to take them back.

She nodded. Taking his hand, she gazed out at the footbridge. "It's all right," she said. "I'm sure you had a reason to change your name."

Yes, he thought uncomfortably, he did have a reason, but as he walked down the bridge with Rapunzel's hand in his, he found himself questioning whether it was a good reason.

At last they reached the town. Flynn stopped outside the dressmaker's and pulled out a purse full of coins from his leather satchel, which he handed to Rapunzel. "I'm going to go to the library. The dressmaker should have some gowns almost finished, that would just need altering to fit your size. You'd look absolutely beautiful in green," he said as his gaze darted greedily over her figure, "but any rich shade would suit you well. Don't be modest about the styling, either." _Please don't,_ he thought.

Rapunzel raised an eyebrow knowingly at him before scampering into the little shop. He waited for a few minutes to make sure that she wasn't going to come out immediately, then walked down the street to the library and went inside.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Fitzherbert," said the librarian. He smiled and nodded to the man. He was a regular in here and well-known under his real name.

Flynn headed straight to the history section and began looking for materials about the local area. He was determined to find out whatever he could about that tower where Rapunzel had grown up. A large, dusty tome caught his eye. The title embossed on the leather-bound spine read, in fading gold letters, _A Historye of ye Village of Amwald, A.D. 900-1599_. He removed the volume from the shelf and brought it over to a desk. He thought about it... the tower had to be at least a century old, but it probably wasn't more than 800 years. And even if it were, it had been obviously well-maintained through the years, so if anything were known about it, it would surely show up in this book.

The book had an index, about which Flynn initially felt relief, but his relief turned to disappointment as soon as he realized that the tower did not show up in the entries there. That was unfortunate. He turned back to the table of contents in the hope of finding a hint of anything else that might lead to the tower, but at once a different heading caught his eye: "Rumours of Blacke Magick in Amwald and ye Falle of ye Family of Corvinus."

At once Flynn turned to this chapter, intrigued both by the mention of witchcraft and the mention of the family whose manor house he now owned. He had never delved into the history of the family, since it had no connection to him and had died out over four hundred years ago, but his curiosity about the occult symbols at the beginning of the old manuscript was too great to ignore. He began reading avidly, quickly becoming immersed in the dusty old book—though the history it narrated set his nerves progressively on edge.

* * *

It seemed that the family migrated into the area from Hungary deep in the medieval period, before complete records were kept. They were definitely situated in the village by the eleventh century, and late in the twelfth the head of the family was knighted for his service in the Crusades. That knighthood brought with it an increase in wealth, and the manor house was built after his return from the Holy Land. In terms of prestige, after the knighthood they were regarded as second only to the family Von Korona itself, rulers of the state. Sir Adelbert had apparently been much impressed with the level of culture and learning in the far-off land, having returned with a collection of books and scrolls in Arabic, including some highly obscure texts. He encouraged his wife and daughter to learn several languages including that one. However, this golden era for the Corvinus family was to be relatively brief.

In 1213, the knight and his lady suddenly and mysteriously turned up dead, leaving behind a seventeen-year-old daughter named Gothel. She had been expected to marry the prince of Corona and join the two estates, but with the deaths of her parents and the independence that came with her inheritance, she ended the engagement and assumed the title of lady of the manor. She never did marry, but neither did she assume responsibility over the village as her parents had done. It was during this time that Amwald began to turn into a haven for underground criminality. The new Lady Corvinus was arrogant and aloof, having little to do with the village, and as the years passed, the villagers began to whisper about her. It seemed that she never visibly aged after about age twenty-five or thirty. Rumors of witchcraft to keep her young started circulating in the village, though no one had anything firm of which to accuse her. Indeed, some villagers made reference to a local legend about a divine gift of sunlight-infused flora, which had supposedly sprouted somewhere nearby in the same year when the Von Korona family had defeated the pillaging Vikings who periodically came. The treaty, the near-universal call for the Korona family to rule, and the legend about the divine blessing given to the land had all merged together by that time in the public awareness. Though no one had confirmed the existence of such a magic flower as of the book's printing date (which Flynn checked and found to be fifty years ago), enough believed in the hidden miracle that Gothel Corvinus's lack of aging did not unquestionably mark her as a witch.

By the latter half of the thirteenth century, however, that had changed. Travelers began to disappear from time to time, especially on dark, rainy nights, and Amwald fully acquired its terrible reputation. People who did dare to venture out, primarily ruffians, started to hear horrific shrieks coming from the grounds of the manor house late at night, as if people were being tormented on the rack or burned alive, but oddly enough, some of the shrieks did not seem to be coming from within the walls of the house. Instead, they almost sounded as if they were coming up from the earth. Late at night, especially on nights of the full moon, villagers would sometimes also hear rumblings from underground that sounded like thunder. Lady Corvinus dismissed most of the servants, and the few she kept rarely left the house, but occasionally one would have to leave to buy something. When questioned about what their mistress did, they said nothing.

The government of Corona finally heard enough to interest it, and in 1290 a small regiment of guards marched up to the house and demanded, under authority of the King—the grandson of the prince that Gothel had once been expected to marry—to speak to the lady of the manor herself. When Gothel came to meet them, she looked every day of her 94 years. Her hair was gray and brittle-looking, and her skin was wrinkled and blotchy. She walked with a cane and shook as she met them. The woman's overwhelming appearance of frailty convinced the guards that this had been a case of unfounded paranoia on the part of illiterate, unsophisticated people. Unlettered ruffians and superstitious peasants _would _point the finger at a haggard, reclusive old woman for whatever ills had befallen them. The guards apologized for troubling her and went back to the kingdom.

–As Flynn read this part, a feeling of foreboding passed over him. Somehow, he knew that this was not the end of the story. Highway robbery and murder by village ruffians _could _very well explain the disappearance of travelers, but it could not explain whatever sounds villagers had been reporting. Apprehensively, Flynn continued to read.

In 1296, when Gothel was 100 years old, something shocking happened. A terrific thunderstorm passed over the village one night, bringing with it a torrential downpour that flooded the town. It also washed out the graveyard. When villagers went to the cemetery to rebury the coffins that had been disinterred, they discovered that numerous graves were empty. The flooding had not been severe enough to carry any coffins away, but at least half a dozen were nevertheless missing. Dark whispers began to circulate concerning the manor house. Then came the truly damning evidence: A group of ruffians had been returning from the inn late one night, and they passed by the graveyard on the way home. The moon had been full, so they got a good glimpse of it. A woman who looked exactly like Lady Gothel Corvinus—not the crone who showed herself to the guards, but the _youthful-looking_ lady of whom some villagers had been so darkly suspicious—was standing over one of the now-empty graves with a long-handled tool in her hand.

The villagers, still fuming over the Crown's dismissal of their suspicions, reacted with rage at this report, which confirmed their worst fears. They formed a mob, and after a meeting at the inn to make plans and pray for protection, they set off for the manor house.

Unfortunately for them, it would seem that Gothel somehow got wind of what was coming her way. When they broke inside, she was nowhere to be found, and her tiny staff of servants could give the raiding mob no account of her whereabouts. In a fit of panic and anger, the mob assumed that the servants were complicit with the old witch and quickly killed them all before anyone could stop to think about it. Then they found the missing coffins. The bodies had been removed and set in vats of acid, half-dissolved. The villagers were properly horrified at whatever vile ritual they had interrupted, but quickly replaced the "mortal remains" in their coffins and reburied them. The witch herself was believed to have died in the woods, as no trace was heard of her again, but the last years of Gothel in the house were why no one wanted to live in it again for four hundred years. Curiously, no underground catacombs, in which she might have imprisoned and tortured captives to screaming, were ever found.

* * *

Flynn closed the book. His hands were shaking nervously, though he chastised himself for it. It was a ridiculous story, he told himself—a product of fear, embellished by ignorance and probably drunkenness. A tale to be laughed at in these more enlightened times.

And yet...

Flynn leaned back in the desk chair and tried to think about what exactly was still bothering him. He knew what it was. Somehow, he felt instinctively that there was a link between this medieval crone and Rapunzel's back story. He thought about the disappearance of Lady Corvinus into the woods. The entrance to that tower _had _been marked with an occult symbol... perhaps the tower had been the old woman's hideout for the brief remainder of her life. –But no, Flynn thought, if _that _had been so, then it wouldn't have said that no trace of her was found. And if _no one _had found her, then her body or skeleton would have remained in the place.

He mused on the possibility that, despite all appearances, the family _had _continued to exist and Rapunzel was directly descended from it. The legend of the succubus passed through his mind in association with the missing travelers... perhaps she had an heir through such an unlawful method while she was still young. –But no, the line would have had to have continued unbroken through the years with no one ever suspecting. It wasn't impossible, but he simply couldn't believe it. There were limits to credulity. And in any case, where had the tower come in? Who had built it and when? Surely, in all the comings and goings from the manor house—_his _house now—someone in the paranoid, gossipy village would have noticed workers regularly hauling heavy stones into the woods. Indeed, would have _followed _them and discovered the tower.

Flynn gave it up. As much as he wanted to, he simply could not make the connection between this thirteenth-century crone and Rapunzel's family. The pieces just did not fit. Besides, he thought, in no part of Gothel's story had there been a mention of alchemy or chemical experiments, just suspected torture, murder, and something to do with corpses. Gothel Corvinus seemed far more like Elisabeth Bathory than Nicolas Flamel, and there had certainly been more than one person through the years interested in arcane, occult subjects.

"Eugene?"

He snapped his head up. Rapunzel was standing to the side, clutching a large wrapped parcel in her arms, a mixture of nervousness and pride spreading over her face.

He felt more at ease just at the sight of her. "Hi," he said, feeling a smile form on his face. "I take it you've got a new dress in there?"

She nodded.

"Great," he said, getting up from the desk. "Well, I think you were interested in looking for some books...?"

"I was," she said shyly.

He held out his arms for the package. "Then look around. I'll hold that for you."

Rapunzel passed over the parcel to him with a smile and quickly scampered off. Flynn sat back down at the desk. He was very tempted to open it and see what she had bought, but he decided that it could wait. Instead he opened his book again. He had to find out if the tower was mentioned in any place. As Rapunzel searched for her own reading material, Flynn browsed through the book looking for any reference to a stone tower deep in the woods. The sun began to sink in the sky, reminding him that they had quite a walk ahead of them. For some reason, which Flynn would not admit was connected with the story he had read, he really did not want to be out walking through the woods after dark.

At last he gave up his search. The tower, whatever its origin, had clearly been built in extreme secrecy, for it seemed that absolutely no reference whatever to it existed. He left the book on the desk for the librarian to reshelve and went looking for Rapunzel. He found her, as he had expected, in the section devoted to chemistry. She had an armful of four heavy books already.

"We should start back," he said, taking the top two books and putting them under the dress parcel. "We can come back here any time you like, though."

"All right," she said, gazing up at him.

After he had officially borrowed the books from the library and they were walking down the street in the direction of the mainland—away from the town—Rapunzel suddenly stopped and turned to him.

"Please, can I go in there?" she asked, gesturing at a particular building. "I won't be long."

He looked up and noticed that it was the chemist's. Of course. "All right," he said, shifting the load in his arms as he turned to go into the shop. "But it really has to be quick."

"I know what I need," she said.

She certainly did, it turned out—though Flynn had no idea what she was planning to make, nor did he have any training in the science that might have aided him in working it out based on the powders and fluids she bought. By the time they left, Rapunzel now carrying a small wooden box on top of her books, it was well past five o'clock. _Thank goodness for long days in the summer,_ Flynn thought. They were far enough north that the sun wouldn't fully set until very late, and the hunger that they were both feeling would hurry them home.

* * *

It _was _dark when they finally reached the looming manor house, however. Flynn felt a curl of unease travel up his spine as he unlocked the front door and helped her inside. _About four hundred years ago, a creepy old woman kept coffins in here that she had unearthed._ The idea was very unsettling to him—but even more so was the idea of the screaming and thundering from underground. What had been easy in the daylight, in a cozy modern library, to dismiss as medieval peasant paranoia was now a lot more unnerving to contemplate.

Flynn lit an oil lamp in the hallway and went into the study, where he lit another one. He set down the books and dress, and Rapunzel also laid down her armload of books and chemical supplies. They were both very hungry now, and whatever Attila had prepared while they were gone smelled wonderful. Wasting no more time than it took to wash their hands, they headed back to the kitchen to get some much-needed food.

After the dinner, Flynn felt better. Food really was a balm for whatever disturbed him, he thought. Everything was better on a full stomach. He gazed out at Rapunzel with satisfaction. All of a sudden, he _really _wanted to see her new dress—and he told her as much, saying lewdly that he would be waiting for her in the bedroom. Blushing, she got up from the table and scampered into the study to put on her dress. He smirked to himself and headed upstairs.

Rapunzel's chameleon was sitting on the sofa in the bedroom when Flynn sauntered in. He peered out at the creature as he began removing his boots. "You'd better find another resting place," he said to it. "I don't want a creepily humanlike lizard watching while I ravish its owner." As Flynn smirked, Pascal turned bright red and his mouth dropped open as if in outrage, but he did not protest, nor did he waste any time leaving the room.

Shortly after the animal had left, Rapunzel hesitantly called out to him from the hallway. "Eugene?" she said uneasily. "I can't—the dressmaker said I needed to have a corset with the dress, so I got one, but it laces up the back, and—"

"Ah," he said, comprehending. The image of Rapunzel garbed in nothing but a corset and drawers flashed through his mind, and all of a sudden, he decided he didn't care about seeing her in the dress itself. That could wait till tomorrow. "I see. Come on in."

Shyly, hesitantly, she moved into the doorway. Flynn's eyes widened as she came into view. The corset was a white one, and it was laced halfway up the back very loosely. Her lacy drawers were also white. She held a long dress of shiny emerald green satin in her arms, and though Flynn could not see it as well as he would have if she were wearing it, he could tell it was fashionably made and embroidered with gold thread. It was a beautiful dress and would suit her very well—but for now, he was perfectly all right with her not wearing it.

Rapunzel set down the dress on the sofa. When she looked up, Flynn had removed his doublet and was striding over to her. He placed his hands around her waist when he reached her, standing behind her. She sucked in her breath.

"The dressmaker laced it—_Eugene!"_ she exclaimed, breaking off—for he had pulled the strings as tight as they would go, making her hitch her breath. "That's too tight!"

He smirked and leaned in, his breath hot on her neck. "Is it?" He threaded the laces through another row and pulled them tight again. "Maybe I like it this way."

She gasped for breath as he laced her up. "It's so restricting," she panted.

He nipped at her earlobe as he steered her toward the bed. She was laced up halfway. "Yeah? Well, maybe that's the point... you left the bed in the morning twice before I woke up. Maybe I _need _to restrict you," he said, pulling the string tight, "to keep you here." He reached the top of the corset and tied the strings in a tight bow. Rapunzel was breathing heavily, though he could not tell whether it was because of the corset or whether she was becoming as excited as he was. He pushed her on her back against the bed and began to unbutton his shirt.

Finally she spoke. "Is this the reason I'm here?" she gasped out.

He tossed the shirt aside and looked down, unwilling to answer her or meet her eyes. Instead he started to remove his pants. She reached out and grabbed his shoulders. "Is this the reason I'm here?" she hissed again.

He raised an eyebrow at her but still would not answer. He wouldn't tell her so, but the question had sent his mind churning, because in truth, he didn't know the answer anymore. And that bothered him. He didn't want to think about this question right now. It was an unwanted distraction. To force his thoughts back to the task at hand, he tossed aside his pants and pulled down her drawers.

Rapunzel glared in indignation at him, but she did not try to stop him. In fact, she bent her knees to help him get her underpants off, a fact that he could not help but smirk at. He put his hands around her pinched waist and pushed forward, filling her.

She gasped for breath, confined by the undergarment, and clutched at his back. As annoyed as she was by his implicit answer to her question—or what she took to be the answer—she couldn't help but notice that this was not at all painful this time. The corset squeezed her, but that was different. And she wouldn't admit it to him, but she had rather liked it when he was lacing her up, especially in combination with what he said to her. He wanted her here; he wanted to keep her here. He valued her. He enjoyed her company. She tried to forget his lack of verbal response to her demand about _why _he wanted her here...

Quickly she felt the pleasurable sensations rising to a sharp peak, a feeling that had not happened the first time. So she had been right that there should have been more, she thought, and this time there _would _be more. She gripped him hard and let out a cry as she climaxed. He gazed down at her smugly, obviously quite pleased that he had been able to make her feel this. He continued for a little while longer before finally surrendering to the rush as well.

Hot, sweaty, and sated, they breathed heavily. Rapunzel's breath was still hitching from the thing she wore. Recognizing this, he climbed off her, rolled her on her side, and unlaced the corset so that she could breathe freely. She heaved a huge breath as her chest was freed again. He tossed the undergarment off the bed and ran a hand down her smooth skin.

They lay there like that for a little while, unable to say anything, but finally she spoke once more. "Well?" she said softly. _"Is_ that the only reason I'm here?"

What he could not say before, he suddenly found it much easier to confess. The deed had made him feel a lot closer to her, and it was only natural that he should speak honestly with her now. He didn't even hesitate as he turned to face her. "Nope," he said, smiling. "Not at all."


	5. A Project and a Mystery

**Author's Note:** Once again, thanks for the interest! Three notes:

With regards to Flynn's characterization, here is why I'm writing him this way. I do not find it plausible that she could do what she does if he acknowledged and cultivated his attachment to her. His protective instinct would kick in, and he would stop it early. By trying to convince himself that she doesn't mean as much, he lets a situation develop that otherwise would not.

There is, at the end of this chapter, a reference to a character from the Lovecraft story that I'm loosely following.

Chapter Six is when things will _really _start to happen. I also suspect that the chapters will become shorter starting with that one.

* * *

**Chapter Five: A Project and a Mystery**

* * *

The following morning, Rapunzel awoke quite early. The sun was just peeking above the horizon. She gave a yawn and glanced at Flynn, who still slept soundly. A smile formed on her face. _He wanted me to wait so that we could get up together,_ she recalled, casting an innocent meaning upon the remark he had made. _And I'm tired. I've done a lot of walking the past three days. I don't need to get up so early anyway._ With that, her tiredness overpowered her, and she curled against him and fell back asleep.

When she woke up again, bright light flooded the room, implying that she had been asleep for at least four more hours. She blinked the blurriness away and found herself staring into a pair of mischievous brown eyes.

"Morning," Flynn said, smiling. "Tired, weren't you?"

She chuckled. "I think I've been tired for a lot longer than I realized."

"I'm amazed it didn't hit you until last night, to be frank."

"I've always been an energetic person," Rapunzel said.

He smirked salaciously at this. "I could tell," he said, "but I don't think we need to go walking anywhere today. I've got another idea for all that pent-up energy of yours." And before she knew what was happening, he rolled her from her side to her back and got on top of her, both of them still unclothed from the previous night.

She blushed hotly—and felt a tinge of annoyance. So _this _was why he wanted her to wait for him to wake up, was it? She supposed that she should have known it wouldn't be any innocent reason. And yet, he had said that this wasn't the only reason he wanted to have her here, and he had sounded sincere when he said it... Smiling at the recollection, she wrapped her arms around his neck and brought him down for a kiss before he could proceed.

They spent most of that morning in bed. Rapunzel, being the inexperienced (and curious) one, went along with all of his suggestions. She enjoyed this a lot now; it made her feel close to him, and in her sweet naïveté, she felt flattered that he was so attracted to _her._

Flynn, on the other hand, was feeling a bit insecure. That same reassurance that _she _had drawn so much comfort from was now weighing on him. It was an expression of vulnerability that was quite distressing to him. He almost wished he hadn't said it, and to try to convince himself that it was merely an artifact of postcoital bliss, he was—perhaps unconsciously—much more aggressive with her than he had been before. After they finished the first time, he flipped her onto her stomach before starting again. Seeing her blissful, ecstatic smiles and the devotion in her eyes made it harder for him to convince himself that she truly was nothing but an object to him...

Finally, when the sun was high in the sky, they were too exhausted to go again. Flynn realized that Attila would soon be by to cook lunch for them, anyway. He carefully got off the bed and went over to his basin to splash himself down. Rapunzel followed after, and when she was finished washing the sweat off herself, she hesitantly picked up the corset that he had tossed to the floor last night. He smirked at this.

"Need help with that?" he said, pulling on his doublet.

"If you can control yourself this time," she teased.

"I'm quite capable of controlling myself," he said in a mock-affronted tone. He went over to where she stood and began to lace up the corset, carefully this time, not too tight around her. She picked up the new green dress off the couch and held it up. He helped her into it, buttoning it up the back, and drew away when he was finished to admire her.

The dress was indeed as beautiful and flattering to her as he had thought it would be. The color accentuated her emerald eyes and complemented her brown hair very well. The cut, too, was much more suited for an adult, with the full skirt and low-cut bodice. She gazed at her reflection in the mirror, and a smile came to her face.

"It's so pretty," she remarked, touching the smooth green satin.

"It certainly is," he agreed, "but it's even prettier on you." He took her hand and brought it to his lips. Then they headed downstairs together.

* * *

Flynn realized after the fact that he should have warned Rapunzel about Attila. He had no particular fear of the usual Snuggly Duckling daytime patrons, of whom Attila was one, but Rapunzel would be intimidated by the large helmeted ruffian. As she was.

When the cook showed up, Rapunzel practically leaped into Flynn's arms in fright. Startled but amused, he set her down and introduced the two to each other, taking care not to say anything more about their "relationship" than that she was alone in the world and would be staying there for the foreseeable future. Attila shifted his head just a bit toward Flynn when he said this, and Flynn judged it fortunate that he could not see the expressions on the man's face behind the helmet, because he was sure that they were not approving. Rapunzel, on the other hand, relaxed a bit at this point, going forward to talk to the ruffian about food. She ended up actually helping him prepare the meal—her own choice.

After lunch, Rapunzel darted off toward the study in search of her chameleon. "I think I'm going to spend the rest of the day in the laboratory room with my new library books, unless you have other plans, of course," she said.

He did not, but he still didn't really like the idea of her spending all that time in the room by herself. He wished that he owned a horse so that he could go riding, or hitch it to a carriage for traveling. There was a white horse, owned by the former royal family, that he'd had his eye on a while back, but he could not figure out a way to acquire it. Stealing it was out of the question, and he did not suppose that the reclusive family would even want to do business with him. He supposed that he should look elsewhere. In the meantime, he decided to spend the afternoon swimming in the small pond on the grounds.

Under the afternoon summer sun, Flynn tried to swim away his troubling thoughts. Rapunzel had developed an attachment to him; there was no question about that. He had thought that this would be a desirable thing, since it would be a strong pull for her to stay there, but now he was not so sure. She was starting to wonder if he reciprocated it. Her questions the night before proved that.

Deep down, he knew that he did. He knew that his reassurance to her last night _had _been sincere, and that his behavior this morning had not achieved its ostensible objective. But he was not ready to say it again, let alone face the consequences of acknowledging an emotional attachment.

At last the sun began to dip low in the sky, and Flynn realized it was time for him to leave the pond for good. He got out, dried himself off, and put his clothes back on. He gazed up at the house. Light poured from the windows of a second-floor room on the far corner of the house—the room that would be Rapunzel's "laboratory." He frowned. She surely hadn't spent the whole afternoon in there... He hurried back to the house and went inside. If she _had _been in there the whole day—and he reluctantly acknowledged the high probability of this, given how interested she was in replicating whatever her mother had done—then she needed to take a break from it.

When he reached the second floor and walked to the end of the hallway, he noticed that the heavy oak door was shut, a state of affairs that rather took Flynn aback. This was _his _house, after all... Somewhat put off, he leaned in and put his ear against the door.

Rapunzel was mumbling something to herself. Flynn could not make out what it was; the door was too solid or her voice was too low or both, but whatever it was, it sounded foreign to him. There was also a rhythmic quality to it, as if she were saying a poem—or repeating the same thing over and over. The tone had a strange sound to it, and a slight chill curled up his spine, but he dismissed this sensation at once. _Well, _he thought, _if it is alchemy, there's probably some sort of ritual or prayer. If somebody said it and then hit upon chemistry that worked, they might have attributed that to the saying._ Soothed by this rationalization, Flynn knocked stoutly on the heavy door.

The muttering stopped at once. "Eugene?" Rapunzel called out in a definably nervous voice. "Do you want to come in?"

_Eugene._ That name, somehow, seemed to symbolize everything that was troubling him with respect to his feelings for her. He wished that she wouldn't call him that, but he _had _told her to call him by whichever name she preferred. Her choice was clear.

He opened the door and walked into the room. She was in the chair again, holding the old manuscript that they had found in the tower. The library books lay at her feet, opened to various pages, and several sheets of paper lay in piles beside each book. As Flynn bent over to look at these pages, he noticed that she had a bottle of ink and a quill on the floor nearby. She had been taking notes out of the library books. The box of chemical supplies and the box of old glassware lay on the floor unused—so far.

Flynn glanced briefly at the portrait of her mother, which still peered malevolently out at the room, before quickly turning away and sitting down in the chair opposite her. "Where's Pascal?" he asked.

Rapunzel turned faintly pink and looked down at her lap. "He didn't want to stay in the room," she mumbled. "I guess he went to the bedroom."

Flynn was not sure what to say to that. His first thought was that if he had been in here, he probably wouldn't have wanted to listen to Rapunzel's chanting to an empty room either, but he decided not to say this. His curiosity about the chanting was too much to resist, however.

"What have you been doing?" he asked, trying to sound casual. "I could've sworn I heard you repeating something."

She blushed more deeply. "I... well, I was following my mother's notes, and they said I was supposed to repeat a formula."

"Why?"

"To... create a certain state. These things don't always work unless your mind is in a particular spirit, and that's what the formula would do."

"I have to ask," Flynn said, "what, exactly, are you trying to do with all this?"

She bit her lip. "It's... an alchemical experiment that my mother wrote about. She didn't finish it before her death, but I think I might be able to perfect it... and if I can, it's really important, Eugene. It would be just incredible, an amazing discovery, if I can do this."

"A discovery of what?"

For the briefest of moments, she hesitated. Then she said quickly, "A biological discovery. It's a procedure that would have... an incredible effect on... the body and mind."

Flynn was still not satisfied with this explanation, but he recognized that he was not going to get anything better at the moment. He wondered if Rapunzel herself really understood what she was researching, or if it even _had _a specific objective. He had heard that a great many alchemical works were full of vague hocus-pocus exactly like what she was saying, and he found himself doubting that any discovery she made would be as profound as she seemed to think, or hope, that it would. But he wasn't going to discourage her. If she wanted to do this to honor her mother or complete her mother's unfinished work, he would humor that... and who knew? Something _might _come out of it...

"Well," he finally said, "let me know if you need any more books or supplies."

* * *

Rapunzel certainly took Flynn's words to heart. Over the next four weeks, she insisted on going to the Corona library three times to exchange one set of chemical and alchemical books for a new set. She would promptly carry the newly borrowed books to her hideaway—as Flynn began to think of the laboratory, with its door usually shut—and pore over them for hours. He wondered how anyone could stand being cooped up indoors so much before recalling that Rapunzel had spent her entire life indoors. This, after all, was nothing new to her.

He tried to coax her outside, into the warm sun and green grass, and sometimes succeeded. One day, he climbed a tree with her, where they rested on a sturdy fork. He leaned against the trunk, holding her in his lap—just holding her around the waist, closing his eyes, letting the leaf-dappled rays of sunlight bathe their faces.

"Eugene?"

He opened his eyes. "Hmm?"

"I was just thinking—you promised me, the very first time we went into town, that you would tell me about your name."

Ordinarily he would not have wanted to discuss that subject, but at the moment, with her warm form pressed so closely, yet innocently, against his, he found himself surprisingly amenable to the conversation. "Sure," he said, squeezing her affectionately and closing his eyes once more as he began the reminiscence about the storybook character for whom he had named himself. She listened attentively, snuggling closer to him as he narrated.

When at last he was finished, she said in a gentle voice, "For the record, I like your real name much better."

He didn't know what to say. He had realized that as soon as she started calling him by that name, but the spell of the moment was breaking as he felt his own vulnerability rushing over him once again.

She turned to him with an expression on her face that was awed, almost reverent. "You know," she said softly, "it's times like this when I wonder if I really ought to..." But whatever she was questioning in her mind, Flynn would not know, because she trailed off mid-sentence and merely said "Nothing" when he asked her.

The event jarred him, though. He was less worried about whatever she had been contemplating than he was about the fact that the moment of sweet, comparatively pure, non-carnal affection in the tree had meant so much to her. It coincided all too well with a change in himself to which he was determined not to surrender.

That night, when they were getting ready to go to bed, she spoke his real name. The moment from earlier in the afternoon was weighing on him, and he couldn't stand hearing that name spoken so longingly and tenderly. He asked her to call him Flynn in bed. She could call him _anything she wanted_ at other times, he said—while a little voice in his head whispered that he would certainly deserve any vulgarity that she threw at him—but he wanted her to use his assumed name during these encounters. He looked away rather than facing the obvious confused pain in her eyes.

Even with this request now fulfilled, he found by the end of the month that he could not continue the exclusively aggressive, impersonal sex. Oh, it achieved its selfish purpose well enough. He certainly was able to regard her as his plaything while pushing her mouth against a pillow to muffle the jubilant and adoring sounds she made as he moved in her, or asking her to pleasure him orally and then not offering to reciprocate, or—as he did one night—blindfolding her before ravishing her. She, being so inexperienced and so curious about it, raised no objections to anything he wanted to do, and he knew that she particularly liked some things (especially, it seemed, the blindfolding—perhaps because of the element of being taken by surprise). Still, he always felt dirty and despicable after such encounters. It wasn't really because of anything he _did, _but because of what he was thinking when he did it and what he told himself it was all about.

Finally, one night a month after she first came to the house, he found that he could not take her to bed the way he had been doing. He couldn't contemplate actually making love to her, but neither did he want to objectify her. And yet he couldn't understand why that would even bother him; hadn't that been his exact intention for her that rainy night when he first realized how alone she was? Feebly, ashamedly, he extinguished the lamps and climbed into bed, giving her merely a good night kiss. In the darkness, he could force himself to sleep rather than deal with his own mental turmoil.

* * *

She was gone again the following morning. Moodily he got himself dressed and headed downstairs, where he found her waiting for him at the breakfast table. A hot breakfast was laid out, one that she had clearly cooked for him. That was unusual.

"Eugene?"

Her voice was hesitant. He glanced up, wondering what she wanted. Between the cooking and her hesitancy, she obviously wanted something, and he felt bad enough about last night that he was prepared to give it to her. "Hmm?"

She looked at the floor. "I hate—I feel bad about asking this, but there are some books... I think I need to _buy _them, from the bookstore."

He smiled. "Are you worried about that? I don't mind buying books. My fortune brings in a pretty sum each year in interest."

"Oh... right. Well, that's good, then." She looked up shyly at him.

"So do you want to go to town today?" She nodded. "All right," he said. "We haven't been in several days anyway."

Once they got to the island, Rapunzel scurried into the bookstore with a purse full of money and a small wooden cart to bring out whatever she bought. He told her to buy whatever she required and to meet back with him at a nice little tavern, where they would have lunch.

While she was in the bookstore, he wandered about the main street. The wanted posters with his picture and name were all long gone, so no one recognized him, but several women obviously admired him. A couple of them were quite pretty, but at this point he wasn't interested. He had moved on from that expensive, risky lifestyle, he told himself—trying to convince himself that there was nothing more to it than that.

He reached the square, where the fading mural of the former royal family still overlooked the cobbled street. As he gazed at the picture of the former queen, he was suddenly struck with how closely she resembled Rapunzel. A wild idea flitted into his imagination, but he immediately dismissed it as absurd on its face. There, right in front of him, was a painting of the princess, and she was as blonde as could be. Rapunzel's resemblance to the queen was just a coincidence, he decided. Completely unrelated people sometimes looked alike. Besides, Rapunzel had _had _a mother.

He walked steadily on, approaching the castle (now part museum, part government building), armory, and prison. He stopped at the sight of the jail. Involuntarily his hand crept to the back of his neck, and a chill passed down his spine. How many times he had feared ending up in that place. He gazed out toward the graveyard, where prisoners who died in jail—or were executed—and had no one to claim their bodies were buried. Another chill. This, too, was something he had feared. It _had _been the fate of two people with whom he had almost allied himself.

Flynn thought about it. Several years ago, when he was learning the tricks of his former trade, he had thought long about teaming up with the Stabbington brothers. It was generally helpful to have backups, but something stopped him. They were brutal, violent, and utterly ruthless, and that was ultimately what gave Flynn pause about the proposition. His modus operandi was stealth and speed, not intimidation and brute force. He did not like being violent, even in self-defense, and certainly not against the intended victims of his thefts. He also knew instinctively that he could not trust them and that they would ultimately turn on him, or he on them, or both on each other.

His suspicions about the Stabbingtons were borne out about a year ago, shortly after he had purchased the manor house. After a fruitful criminal career terrorizing the people of Amwald and Corona in the period when the royals were drowning in their own grief, the brothers were finally arrested for accosting and attempting to rob a woman traveling alone in the woods. The guards had found them knocked out and bound by the woman herself, and were duly impressed with her ability to handle herself. They were less impressed with the pathetic exclamations of the brothers that the woman had "used witchcraft" against them, calling on some unspeakable witch-god for aid, whose terrible presence caused them to black out. The witchcraft panic that had spread across Europe in the previous century was quickly receding, and such wild tales elicited only scorn now. The brothers were brought to trial for their many crimes, sentenced to death, and hanged.

Flynn knew he had made the right choice. While he was certainly capable of stealing (and of seducing and manipulating an unprotected young woman), he was never capable of the sort of thuggery, assault, and murder that the brothers had to their names when they went to the gallows—to say nothing of accusing a would-be _victim_ when thwarted. He did have _some _ethics, he thought haughtily.

Flynn decided that he had seen quite enough. He had moved on from _this _as well, he thought fiercely, as he swiftly turned around and almost _marched _back toward the tavern that he had picked out.

When Rapunzel showed up, she was hauling a cartload of books with her. When he asked, conversationally, what they were, she hesitantly brought out one (which seemed to him to have been carefully chosen) and presented it to him. It was a copy of Hermes Trismegistus in a modern edition.

"Is something this ancient actually useful?" he asked, running a finger down the gold stamping.

"The notes mentioned it," she said, taking the book away and putting it back into her cart.

The notes. Flynn supposed that this meant that old manuscript he had found in the tower. He really would give a lot of money to have a good look at that thing, to try to find out exactly what she was doing... but he knew that was not likely to happen anytime soon.

* * *

For another couple of weeks, she started going to the bookstore every two or three days, bringing home more books, but she only required a heavy canvas bag for these. Chemical smells started to pour out of the laboratory, a new development, and Flynn found that he did not even want to go in there. He worried about her spending so much time in the room and insisted that she should open the window whenever she worked on her alchemical project.

He felt, during this time, that she was not as close to him as she had been at the first. Maybe it was the growing aura of secrecy in which she seemed to envelop herself. Whatever she was doing in there, she really did not like to talk about it much. He was also reasonably sure that sometimes she was not in the Corona bookstore when she was supposed to be. Once he came into the bookstore to meet with her, and he saw her sweaty and panting, as if she had just been running back to the store from somewhere else. She claimed it was because of lifting heavy books, but he was not convinced. He didn't press the subject, though.

Strangely, the distance between them did not make it easier for him to regard her as a carnal object. It was not the distance of indifference; Flynn knew that there was an aspect of envy—envy, in this case, of the project that took up her time and sealed her lips. If anything, it intensified his desire for her.

One night in the middle of September, he was thinking—brooding—about all this in his bedroom. Rapunzel had spent the entire day, sans meals, in the laboratory, which seriously annoyed him. He had hardly spoken to her during the day, but he wasn't about to go in there and demand that she talk with him if she would rather work. Her chameleon Pascal entered the room and clambered up the sofa next to him. Maybe he was imagining things, but at this point he was pretty sure that the creature was something special—and at the moment, it was looking at Flynn with very reproachful eyes.

"What are you looking at?" he snapped. Pascal's eyes narrowed in anger. "All right, all right," Flynn said quickly, not wanting to be on the wrong end of the animal's tongue. "Sorry. Is she upset with me?"

Pascal looked mournful again. Gingerly Flynn held out a hand for the chameleon to climb into. Pascal quickly scampered up his arm and perched on his shoulder, like he had done with Rapunzel so many times. He walked down the hallway and knocked on the laboratory door.

"Come in!" Rapunzel called out giddily. Flynn was surprised; he had expected her to be in a cheerless mood because _he _was. He pushed open the door and walked inside. At once an acrid chemical stench filled his nostrils.

About a week earlier, she had wanted a table moved into the room—not a valuable or a new one, she said, and in fact, the more dilapidated, the better, as long as it would stand up. He had found such a table in the old attic, and it was being put to good use. The box of supplies from the chemist's was now mostly empty, and the flasks that had come out of the tower were finally filled with chemical solutions and powders of assorted colors, resting on top of the battered table. The books must have contained information that led her to a key turning point in her research. Avoiding the sinister gaze of Rapunzel's mother from above the mantel, he noticed that the pile of notes she had been making had grown substantially and now occupied several notebooks. The old manuscript of her mother's was nowhere in sight.

"This is really something," Flynn remarked, looking around the room. "It looks like a real laboratory now."

Rapunzel beamed. "It is a real laboratory! I'm finally accomplishing something." She brought her arms close to her chest, hugging herself to dissipate the energy that she was feeling. "You know, Eugene, I had the most uncanny dream last night, and my mother was in it. Something—a problem I've been having—the solution came to me in the dream, and I had to work on it."

"That's great," Flynn said. Inwardly he was confused; Rapunzel seemed very happy—ecstatic, even—about her breakthrough. He was also happy about it because perhaps it meant that she would start spending less time in the lab and more with him. He couldn't figure out why Pascal should have been so mournful about this or reproachful toward _him._

He tried to clear his head. It was ridiculous to worry about the perceptions of a chameleon. He had just become too used to thinking of it in an anthropomorphic way.

He gazed around the room and noticed at once that the black-and-red urn she had brought with her to the house was now open, for the first time ever, and apparently empty of whatever it had once contained. "Was there anything in this?" he asked conversationally. She nodded, pointing at a flask on the table containing a brownish powder.

As he continued to gaze around the room, he saw something that had passed by him initially. The once empty bookcase now contained volumes, and that these were the new books she had purchased, he did not doubt. He strode across the room to look at them.

At once a series of titles met his eye that took him utterly by surprise. He had been expecting mainstream chemistry with well-known alchemical authors mixed in. What he found were two whole shelves in the bookcase filled with tomes by a dozen different kabbalists, self-titled wizards, numerologists, demonologists, and alchemists both benign and sinister. It was a decent sample of the forbidden lore of the medieval period, and it was now resting on his own bookcase.

He turned to her in amazement. "You found all this in the bookstore?" he gasped.

She shook her head hesitantly. "No. Well, yes, but it... had been ordered in advance."

"Ordered in advance?" Flynn did not know what to think of that. He didn't _mind _that she had put in requests for these books, but he didn't like that she had done it without telling him... What else, he wondered, had she been keeping from him?

She looked down at her feet. "There were... my mother knew some people, and corresponded with them. They were colleagues in this—work that she did. She left some letters in that old manuscript you found, and I took the liberty of writing to them. They had these books sent to the bookstore for me."

Flynn ran his index finger along the spine of a volume called _Turba Philosophorum._ "And you need all these?"

She was still looking down. "The notes said I did."

He gazed around the room again, finally fixing on the table where the chemicals simmered. A book was laid out in the midst of the flasks, which he had not noticed before. He went over to the table to have a look at which book it was.

It was a battered old tome, clearly not a new book. Flynn glanced over the pages to which it was open and immediately noticed that one section had been underlined very strongly in black ink. His eyes were drawn at once to that paragraph, which read—

"_The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of human Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."_

Rapunzel was there at once, taking the book away from him, closing it with a dust-inducing slam of its covers, and quickly shelving it. "I forgot about that one," she said hurriedly. "I don't normally leave them on the table in the middle of all this."

Flynn was less concerned about the treatment of the old book than about the text he had just read. It, frankly, made his skin crawl. "Rapunzel, about that page—" he began.

"I didn't do it," she exclaimed. "It was already underlined. The book was used."

"But it was open to that part. What, exactly—"

"It falls open there on its own," she said stubbornly.

He met her eyes and detected a veritable wall before him. The book was significant, somehow; it had to be or she wouldn't act this way about it, but he could tell from the look in her eyes that she was not going to talk about it, though she seemed to be expecting further questioning. He decided to take her by surprise.

"Who, by the way, are these colleagues of your mother's?"

Her gaze darted toward something on the floor next to the chair where she had been seated. It was an almost imperceptible shift, but Flynn, with years of practice at observation and quick reaction, caught it. Before she could do anything, he lunged for the sheet of paper and brought it closer to the nearest lamp so that he could read it.

"Eugene—" she began to protest, but it was too late; he had the page in hand and was reading it with growing indignation.

_Castle Ferenczy_

_Rakus, Transylvania_

_14 August 1701._

_Dear Fräulein R.—_

_I was muche pleased to heare from you if indeede you represente yr esteem'd Mother and wishe to continue her Worke. I have enclosed a List of Bookes which may be Usefull, and shal place ye Order at ye bookseller for ye Bookes which yr Mother mention'd in her notes. I am inform'd that ye volume by Abdul Al-Hazred is harde to come by, and I have but one Copy, yet 'tis likely a Necessity. Rumour has it that yr Mother owned this Booke, so it may be that she has hidden it away. Looke to ye Symbols, I thinke, and you will finde ye Booke._

_I bid you Caution, for this studie has in recent past attracted ye Attention of officious Busybodies and interfer'g Moralists, who may be a great Peril to Those who undertake this Worke. Yet ye Rewards are vast and great._

_Beste Wishes and Lucke._

_Edw. H._

Flynn set down the letter. The vein in his neck was throbbing, and he felt heated all over. Angrily he turned to Rapunzel, who was cowering by the fireplace.

"All right," he said between clenched teeth, "who is that man and why are you writing to him? That's why you were sweaty and out of breath that day, wasn't it? You'd been to the post office. And what the _hell _are you up to?" He was furious, and while the substance of the letter did sound vaguely sinister to him—especially the mention of the unknown author and the "symbols"—what _really _had set him raving was the fact that Rapunzel had been secretly writing to another man. That, more than anything else, was what had enraged him, and it was quickly engulfing all other feelings of concern that the letter had evoked.

A tear trickled down her face. "It's not what you think!" she exclaimed in a choked voice. "He's just a person that my mother knew! A professional colleague. I don't know if she even met him. I haven't written anything implying—I don't _like him, _ugh! What an idea! I'm _yours, _Eugene! Don't you know that?"

The disgust she felt at the idea and the pleading in her last remarks were palpable, and Flynn seemed to calm down at these words. His other question, about what she was really up to, was forgotten as he rushed forward and took her in his arms. Even the sinister text that he had just read was forgotten.

"I'm sorry," he said softly as he stroked her hair. "I know. I know. I just lost it for a moment." She felt so good, so warm next to him. He had really missed this.

"If it bothers you, I won't write any more letters," she murmured into his chest.

He felt kind of bad about saying so, but the truth was, it _did _bother him. "I... would feel better if you stuck to books. And your mother's notes," he said.

She nodded. "I don't think I'll need to write to anyone anyway... I'm pretty close to..." She trailed off, then changed the subject. "Eugene, let's go to bed. I've spent all day in here—"

"You have," he agreed, smiling.

"—and I'm tired of it."

"All right," he said softly, giving her a kiss and leading her out of the room.


	6. A Storm and a Catalyst

**Author's Note:** Thanks for sticking with the story. And now here we go!

* * *

**Chapter Six: A Storm and a Catalyst**

* * *

That night, Flynn was sound asleep and did not notice when Rapunzel silently slipped out of bed, pulled on one of her older gowns and a pair of heavy boots, and quietly left the room. She felt bad about sneaking around like this. She was fundamentally an honest person, and operating—as she had been—in such secrecy around Flynn was not in her nature. She truly did like him, and she had to have a powerful reason to keep secrets from someone she liked, but there _was _a powerful reason. Rapunzel had managed to subdue her terrible grief over the loss of the only person she had known for so many years, because her work and her growing attachment to Flynn kept her thoughts occupied, but the grief remained just below the surface, and it was intensified by a feeling of guilt and self-blame.

As she walked softly downstairs, she heard a pattering behind her. "Pascal!" she hissed. The chameleon stopped and looked reproachfully up at her. "Oh, all right," she whispered, bending over and holding out her hands. Pascal climbed into them and scurried onto her shoulder. She supposed that it _would _be better for her to have his guidance. She tiptoed into the kitchen, picked up the nearest threatening-looking object—a heavy frying pan—and finally slipped out the back door, grabbing the lantern off the floor as she left.

Pascal might not approve of what she was doing, but he didn't want her lost in the woods if she was nevertheless determined to do it. With her little chameleon pointing the way, she found the tower without any trouble.

"Look to the symbols," she murmured softly to herself as she stepped inside the ground-level entrance. She finally lit the lantern, which she had managed to avoid doing until now, and immediately gasped in astonishment. There at her feet was a stone with a _symbol _carved upon it. It was a little more than three feet in diameter. She backed out of the stone entrance, set the lantern down on the ground, and got on her hands and knees to examine the stone. The stone floor did not seem to be mortared, and the gaps between the paving stones were just large enough for feminine fingers to slip through. Rapunzel bit her lip in contemplation as she gripped the sides of the central stone, with its carved design.

Pascal gave a loud _cheep_ of protest as she began to lift it up. "Pascal!" she complained. "I _have_ to."

She pulled the stone up from the ground and set it down on top of the others. Her eyes grew wide. "Oh my goodness," she exclaimed in an awed voice.

The sun was just starting to rise when Rapunzel finally made it back to the house. Pascal abandoned her at the foyer, unwilling to follow her to her favorite room in the house. She darted upstairs, pattered softly down the hallway past their bedroom, and slipped into her laboratory, where she promptly deposited a heavy book, shoving it into a stack of papers to conceal it as best she could. She took off her boots and dress in the lab and slipped back into the bedroom almost naked. When she saw that Flynn still slept soundly, she breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped back under the covers and fell asleep.

She awoke again a few hours later to a gentle nudge from him. "Wake up, sleepyhead," he said in an amused tone.

_Sleepyhead, indeed,_ she thought as her eyelids fluttered open. She was pretty sure she felt more tired _now _than she had when she came back from the tower just before dawn. She couldn't have had more than two or three hours of sleep, and she knew she was going to pay for it today, but she didn't think she had any other choice. Yawning, she felt as if she literally could not get out of bed and would fall asleep again any moment.

Flynn looked vaguely disappointed at how tired she was, but he decided it would be ungentlemanly to pursue his object when she was so clearly exhausted. He didn't know why she would be—she had spent the whole previous day inside—but there it was nonetheless. He leaned over and gave her a light kiss on the forehead. "All right, go back to sleep if you need to," he said indulgently. "But I'm going to get up."

She slept until noon.

* * *

Flynn did not know about the book or the nighttime trip to the tower, and if he had known about the latter, he would have insisted on seeing the former to know exactly what book had been so important that it warranted such a jaunt. What he did notice was that for the next few days, Rapunzel did not express any interest in going to town to acquire more books. He wondered at that, and that same letter that had inspired such outrage from him a few days ago came back to his mind. He distinctly recalled the phrase "look to the symbols and you will find the book," and he couldn't help but wonder if the old manuscript that he had found in the tower many weeks ago contained some kind of cipher-clue about the elusive book's location.

Yet he knew she did not leave the grounds of the house—at least, during the waking hours. The implications of that idea weighed on him, albeit too late, and he began locking the bedroom door at night and keeping the key under his pillow. Rapunzel noticed this and began to fear that he suspected she had sneaked out that night, but she could not work up the courage to ask him why he was suddenly doing this. Instead she devoted herself during the daylight hours to intensive study of the book but made sure to spend at least the last two hours before bedtime with him. If he _didn't _suspect that she had left the house during the night, she was sure that he was locking the bedroom door out of a sense that they didn't have enough time together. She supposed that over the past two or three weeks, she _had _become obsessed with her project at the expense of spending time with him. She began making profile drawings of him when they sat in the study together, something that she actually enjoyed very much. It was easy to forget the powders and sinister old books upstairs when she was immersed in drawing his handsome features...

On the whole, though, Flynn could not help but feel that something very significant was about to happen. A sense of nervous anticipation hung over the manor house. One night, he was in the study, waiting for her to come back down, when dim flashes of light—blurs, really—began to illuminate the night sky. He gazed idly out one of the windows. Yes, there appeared to be a lightning storm, and judging from the dimness of the flashes, he figured it was mostly off in the distance. He turned back to the book he was currently reading.

The steady lightning continued, however, and got brighter. Flynn gave a sigh; apparently the storm was heading their way. He glanced up again. He couldn't see any bolts striking the ground; whatever was going on remained inside the clouds. Something was odd, though. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was, but something about this storm was not right.

After a particularly bright flash, he realized what it was. There was no thunder with this lightning. Come to think of it, he had not heard any all evening.

A chill quickly shot down his spine at this realization. All of a sudden, he wanted Rapunzel to be in the room with him. He didn't like the thought of her by herself in that isolated room at the end of the second-floor hallway. For that matter, he didn't even like the thought of little Pascal all alone in whatever room that the chameleon was currently in. He wanted them all together. He bookmarked and closed his book, setting it down on the table, when a rapid pattering of tiny feet caught his ear. He whipped his head around to find the source.

Pascal raced through the study door, squealing in his tiny lizard voice, and darted inside Flynn's doublet just as the bolt hit.

It was purplish-white, and in that terrifying moment—barely a millisecond—when it illuminated the whole room, Flynn was sure he saw things that just _did not belong._ Vaguely humanlike shapes and forms, though hideously distorted, were superimposed over the furniture and contours of the study. Everything was bathed in a ghastly, vividly bright ultraviolet-and-white, lending a stark, harsh unreality to the room.

Then the flash was gone as quickly as it had come. The room looked normal again, and the shadowy forms—if such things there had been—vanished so completely that Flynn instantly questioned his own perceptions from a moment before. That was when the massive central chimney collapsed. With a terrific crash, bricks tumbled down all the fireplaces connected to that massive stack, including the one in the study. Dust rose up from the hearth. Flynn's heart was racing, and the creature clinging in sheer terror to his shirt did not help matters, though he couldn't blame Pascal for being frightened.

Ignoring the chimney for now, he left the study and headed upstairs. "Rapunzel?" he called out in a shaky voice.

There was a pause, and then she responded. "Eugene?"

"Are you all right?" he asked as he reached the top of the stairs.

"Yes," she said. The door at the end of the hallway opened, and a frazzled—but curiously triumphant-looking—Rapunzel stepped out of the laboratory. She promptly closed the door behind her and headed down the hallway to meet him.

He swept her into his arms and squeezed her tightly. Pascal crept out of his vest and onto his shoulder. If he had bothered to look, he would have noticed the chameleon giving its owner—or, considering how it had chosen Flynn over her, perhaps former owner—an unmistakable glare of disapproval.

"We lost the chimney in that," he murmured into her hair.

"Oh no," she said quietly.

"It's all right, though," he said, stroking her back. "We're all safe." He said it more to convince himself than to soothe her. That ghastly whitish-purple flash and those shadows were still bothering him, though the brief moment was fading fast from his immediate memory.

"I'm sorry about the chimney," she said penitently.

He looked down at her in surprise. "It wasn't your fault," he said.

She glanced at him looking wide-eyed and guilty, almost as if she wanted to argue the point—but that didn't make sense, Flynn thought. And sure enough, in a moment, her expression softened, and she nodded silently. He squeezed her again. He did not really feel like going to the study. He wanted to get under the sheets with her—not for a sexual reason, but because after that, he needed to cuddle with her.

* * *

The next day, he headed out to the Snuggly Duckling shortly after lunch, leaving Rapunzel in her laboratory. Pascal scampered after him and leaped onto his leg, attaching himself to his pants and climbing up his body like a kitten might, much to his astonishment.

"Hey, little guy," he said as the chameleon found its place on his shoulder. "I'm going to the pub. You might not like it in there... and your owner is going to be annoyed with you, or jealous of me, or both, if you keep choosing me over her."

Pascal narrowed his eyes at Flynn and dug his scaly toes into the seam at Flynn's shoulders. Flynn sighed. "Fine, suit yourself," he said in resignation as he headed out the door.

The ground was dry as a bone on the way to the Duckling, something that struck Flynn as rather odd. He did not recall there being any rain with the storm at his house, but surely it had rained _somewhere _close by. Yet there was no sign of it. He didn't even see any evidence that the wind had gotten up. And with no rain, but lots of lightning, wouldn't there have been a very high risk of fires? That, too, hadn't happened. He was thoroughly confused by the time he reached the pub, but there was no mistaking the fact that a lightning bolt had hit his house. The bricks from the chimney lay scattered all over multiple rooms in the house, and from the outside, the shattered stack marred the outline of the house.

He walked into the pub and glanced around. The usual daytime crowd was there: Hookhand at the battered piano, Big Nose, Vladamir, Bruiser, Killer, Gunther, Ulf, Attila, Fang, Shorty, and Greno were the ruffians that Flynn immediately noticed. He went up to the bar and ordered a mug of beer, which the bartender shoved at him.

"What're you doing here, Rider?" Big Nose said.

Flynn took a sip. "I've actually got a job offer for somebody."

Several of the thugs looked up. "What kind?" Vladamir asked gruffly.

"Cleaning out a bunch of broken bricks from the house and repairing the main chimney stack."

Some of the thugs exchanged glances. "It fell down?" asked Vladamir.

"Yeah, a lightning bolt hit it last night."

Confused looks came over the face of everyone listening to him. "What're you talking about?" asked Hookhand. "Last night was clear as could be."

"Yeah," chimed in Big Nose, "I went outside and gazed up at the stars." A dreamy look came over his face, and the rest of the thugs glanced away, but no one would criticize or laugh at him. There seemed to be respect among the ruffians for each other's quirks and foibles. Flynn had once seen Bruiser knit and Killer sew, while Fang made hand puppets. No one in the daytime group ever made fun of them.

But what the ruffians were saying was seriously alarming to Flynn. "Look," he said, "I know a lightning strike when I see one. It hit the house... lit up the very room I was in." He pushed the memory of that brief moment out of his mind. "And for a while before that, there had been distant flashes."

The thugs looked really confused now. "I didn't see nothing," Big Nose said. "It must have been right over your house and went away quickly."

Flynn felt a chill creep up his spine once more, but he tried to ignore this. "Must have," he said, trying to sound nonchalant. "In any case, it hit the chimney. Can anyone come out to repair it? You know I'll pay generously."

The ruffians exchanged glances with each other, nonverbally deciding who should go out to do the job. Finally Vladamir, the largest ruffian, spoke. "I'll do it," he said.

"Great," Flynn said, though his words were not enthusiastic. "When can you do it?"

"In a couple of days."

Flynn drained his mug. "Appreciate it," he said, striding over to shake the ruffian's overly large hand. He needed to seal the deal, but he wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. It seriously disturbed him that none of them knew about the thunderstorm, and he wanted to leave behind this place and head back to the house at once.

* * *

When he got back, Rapunzel was in her laboratory with the door closed, but even through the heavy door, Flynn could hear her chanting rhythmically once again. Her voice was much louder and stronger in this chant, which seemed to Flynn to be a strange mix of Latin and Hebraic words. He listened outside the door for several minutes before realizing that she was repeating the same couple dozen words over and over. Flynn could not understand anything that she was saying, but there was a definably dark tone to the chant. Pascal could not stand to listen to it and immediately dashed down Flynn and across the hallway, leaping frantically down the stairs.

Flynn rather wanted to follow the chameleon, but he steeled himself and knocked on the door. At that very moment, she stopped her chant, and out of the keyhole there issued at once a flash of light and an incredibly foul chemical stench.

_She must have just mixed something that ignited,_ Flynn thought shakily. _That happens sometimes. Some things burn when they mix with other things._ He told himself this as if he were trying to convince himself not of the truth of it, but of the _falsehood _of something else—though _what _else it was he feared, he could not or would not name.

"Rapunzel?" he said, but to his surprise, he could not manage a voice above a hoarse whisper.

Either she did not hear him or she ignored him, engrossed in whatever she was doing. A crackling rumble sounded from behind the door, followed by a smell slightly different from the one that had just issued forth. Flynn stood by the door, unable and unwilling to move.

She began to chant again, but this time it was different, and he did not recognize the language at all. The words, though, seemed imprinted in his brain, as if he would never forget them. Phonetically, they sounded to Flynn like this: _"Yi nash yog sothoth he lgeb fie throdag"_—followed at once by a shrieking _"Yah!"_

Right after she finished this last bizarre syllable of the whole bizarre incantation, a scream in a female voice that did not sound quite like Rapunzel's began to sound, a scream that rapidly turned to maniacal, sardonic laughter. Flynn was transfixed with a horror that he could neither name nor even describe as the chortling echoed off the stone walls. Finally taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door, but to no avail. He drew back, breathed deeply once more, and closed his fingers around the doorknob, only to find that Rapunzel had locked it.

It was just as this realization passed through his mind that the sardonic laughter ceased and Rapunzel began to speak in her normal voice. Her tone was very low, and the words she was saying were indecipherable, but her muttering continued. Flynn listened closely, pressing his ear against the keyhole, but to no avail. All he could make out—though this was enough to frighten him—was that the muttering was taking on an overall tone of conversation or dialogue. As he listened closely, he realized that about half of the muttered phrases—an _alternating _half—seemed to be in that slightly different, slightly more sardonic and triumphant tone that he had never before heard Rapunzel use.

He steeled his nerves once more and knocked on the door once more, far more loudly this time, calling out her name sternly. At once the muttering ceased, and in the familiar, inquisitive, excited voice of Rapunzel's came the exhortation _"Sssh!"_

There was then some shuffling and heavy thumping behind the door, and in a moment, Flynn heard the lock click and saw the door swing partially open. Rapunzel edged out, dressed in one of her increasingly worn-out older dresses and smelling of chemicals. Her hair was frizzy and her eyes were wide with excitement and unmistakable joy. She slipped through the door and closed it behind her at once, before he could go in.

"Oh, Eugene," she exclaimed.

He glared at her. "What were you doing in there?" he said, his heart pounding. He spoke with more authority than he felt, but he wanted to calm himself and that seemed to help. "That chanting—the flash of light and the rumblings—and then the muttering—"

"I'm sorry, Eugene," she said, still sounding more excited than penitent. "I'll clean everything up as soon as I'm... calmed down... and the rest of it, well, it won't happen again. I promise you that—it _definitely _won't happen again."

She spoke firmly, and in spite of himself, he believed her about that. "It had better not," he said sternly, still trying to calm his own nerves. He steered her away from the door and down the hallway. "What was it? What were you trying to do in there? I want answers, Rapunzel," he said. It suddenly seemed as if all the uncertainties and questions he'd had over the past weeks were settling at the forefront of his mind. "You obviously have been doing a lot more in there than you've been telling me, and I think I deserve an explanation."

"You're right," she agreed at once. "I've just had the breakthrough I've been looking for all along... It won't happen again. It's your house, I know, and you've been so good to me, letting me stay here and offering me room and board—and being so, erm, affectionate with me"—here she blushed and paused awkwardly before continuing—"but what was going on in there was this... chemical reaction. That was the flash of light. The rumbling just came from... another reaction, an explosive one."

"An _explosive _one?" he exclaimed in alarm.

"Nothing caught fire," she said hurriedly. "Nothing of yours was damaged."

"What about the chanting?" he said, a chill curling up the back of his neck at the memory of that last round of muttering, those distinctly different voices or tones, and the suggestion of a conversation.

"It was part of the procedure," she explained. "I don't entirely understand it, but, well, it worked..." She cleared her throat. "But it won't happen again," she repeated.

"You're quite right it won't," he said firmly, steering her toward the staircase. She glanced back at the closed-off room for a moment before deciding to go with him.

It took them almost an hour to locate Pascal, who was found curled up in catatonic shock under one of the chairs in the study. Flynn brought him out, observing his staring, shocked, completely dilated eyes. He frowned at Rapunzel, hoping that she would feel properly contrite for scaring her chameleon so much.

"I'm sorry, Pascal," she said, stroking his tiny head. He moved a bit at her touch, and his pupils contracted to normal size. "It's all right."

The chameleon seemed to thaw. His movements were slow, but with a bit of coaxing—he was more responsive to Flynn than to Rapunzel—he was willing to crawl up Flynn's arm and rest on his shoulder. There he stayed for the rest of the day, even when they were eating.

Rapunzel wanted to go to back to the laboratory to supposedly clean up, but Flynn was reluctant to let her go in there again. Finally, though, when it was almost nighttime, he decided that she needed to bathe anyway—she still had a chemical scent in her hair—and she might as well do it after she had cleaned the place. She scampered happily down the hallway and slipped quickly through the door, closing it behind her. Flynn hung around the door, not sure what he was expecting—or fearing—to hear, but at once he started to hear the normal sound of sweeping and nothing more. He heaved a deep breath and headed off to the bath. He could use one himself, not because he was dirty, but because the warm bath would relax him.

After he was washed, somewhat relaxed, and stretched out under cool sheets with a book in hand, he waited for Rapunzel to finish cleaning and begin her own bath. He heard the door to the laboratory creak open slowly and footsteps patter softly down the hall toward the other end, where the bedroom and stairs were.

The room was lit only by the lamp on the nightstand and the hall only by a candle set in an inset in the middle of the hallway, so Flynn could not be sure of what he saw, but it seemed to him that when Rapunzel passed by the half-open bedroom door, she was trailed by something else hidden beneath a black sheet or cloak. _It must be a sack filled with the dust and whatever else she cleaned up,_ he told himself firmly.

Flynn heard the front door to the house open, then a minute later, shut. Footsteps bounded up the stairs once more. "I'm going to get my bath now," Rapunzel called out as she passed by the bedroom again.

Something about her tone bothered him. Her voice was too bright and nonchalant. He didn't trust it; it sure seemed to him that this tone was meant to conceal something, but he could prove nothing. He decided that the events of the day—heck, the past two days—had simply set his nerves on edge so much that he was imagining things now. He tried to focus on his book, and when that didn't work, he tried to think about Rapunzel getting into the bathtub. That was a nice thought, and his imagination gladly latched onto _that_.

When she finally emerged, the chemical scents that had saturated her hair and clothes were mercifully gone. Flynn was relieved; he wanted as little as possible to remind him of that disturbing incident earlier in the day. Fortunately, Rapunzel's own presence evoked nothing of her activities in the laboratory. Dressed in a white nightgown, standing shyly in the doorway, Rapunzel looked more innocent—and, in Flynn's mind, desirable—than she had since the first night she came to the house.

"I see you're all clean," he remarked. "Why don't you come here?" He smiled encouragingly at her.

Hesitantly, blushingly, she came into the lamplight and sat down on the mattress. He reached out and pulled her into a kiss, which she happily returned.

"Now that you've had a breakthrough on your project, can I reward you for your cleverness?" he murmured against her skin, pulling her down.

She giggled. "If you want to."

"I think I do want to," he growled, reaching for her nightgown and pulling it off her as he positioned himself on top of her.

Eventually, they were ready to go to sleep.

* * *

The next morning, Flynn was the first to wake up. Rapunzel lay on her side, curled up against him. He smiled at her, but as he slowly became fully awake, all the thoughts that he had tried to ignore and push away rushed back to his mind. It suddenly occurred to him that now, while she was sleeping, was an excellent chance to go into her laboratory—when he had started to think of the room in his house as _her _sanctum, he was not sure—and see if he could find any clues about what she had apparently accomplished last night. Throwing on a robe, he shuffled down the hallway and opened the door.

Light flooded the room through the windows. Flynn gazed around the room and instantly got the impression that something was off, but he could not immediately figure out what it was. The flasks that had formerly rested on top of the table were piled up inside their old wooden box once again on the floor, completely empty of the powders and liquids that they had once held. The black-and-red urn stood next to the box, capped once more. Flynn went over to it, got on his knees, and opened it, turning it upside down gingerly—but nothing fell out. The books Rapunzel had purchased over the past several weeks were all neatly lined up on the bookshelves, though he thought he saw a black leatherbound volume that he had never noticed before. The old manuscript that he had found that one day in the tower was still nowhere in sight, and Rapunzel's own notebooks were piled up on another bookshelf.

As he got back on his feet, his gaze shifted toward the mantel, and that was when he realized what was different. The oval portrait of Rapunzel's mother, the painting that had so disturbed him with its creepily realistic eyes, was gone. An empty canvas, still stained with vague, formless blobs of paint that were absorbed into it, now hung over the mantelpiece. Whether it was from the lightning bolt of the day before yesterday or the flashing of Rapunzel's last round of experimentation, the sinisterly gazing portrait was no longer.

Flynn was staring in surprise—not sadness, exactly, for _he _wouldn't miss the woman's sinister stare—for so long that he didn't even notice that Rapunzel had come into the room. Suddenly, though, he realized that she was standing beside him.

"Your painting," he said, regretful for her sake—because after all, it had been her work, and her late mother.

Rapunzel, however, merely smiled in a wry, ironic way that Flynn found utterly unaccountable. "Oh, it's quite all right," she said through that smile.

He raised an eyebrow questioningly at her, but she would not say anything more. She just stood there smiling in that enigmatic way, as if something about the loss of the painting was actually amusing to her. Giving up, he took her by the arm and headed downstairs to eat.


	7. A Shadow and a Barrier

**Content warning:** Angry love/hate sex. I'm sorry. I did say this was going to be dark.

* * *

**Chapter Seven: A Shadow and a Barrier**

* * *

A tension had formed in the small household, and it had managed to thoroughly cut up Flynn's self-centered vision of domestic peace. Rapunzel had been true to her word that no further screams, chants, creepy pseudo-conversational mutterings, or even obnoxious chemical scents issued forth from the laboratory. In fact, she had barely been in the room at all, but since that afternoon when she had seemingly become so engrossed in the strange ritual that she temporarily lost her senses, she had apparently checked out of everyday life.

Nothing seemed to hold her attention anymore. When Vladamir cleaned out the house of all the broken bricks and rebuilt the chimney, Flynn observed the proceedings with a keen eye, but Rapunzel paid no attention whatever. That was odd, since, even though she had been obsessed with her laboratory project, heretofore she had expressed curiosity about anything new. A vacant look came over her face at mealtimes, and she frequently was completely inattentive to the conversation that Flynn attempted to hold with her.

She also expressed little interest in going to town. One day soon after the _incident _when _he _wanted to go, she went along with the idea without argument—but also without enthusiasm. She was not interested in going to the library or bookstore, and when he finally gave up on interesting her in books and brought her to the dressmaker's shop to get some more clothes, she hardly had an opinion to offer. And yet her general aspect did not give Flynn the idea of her having no spark for life; instead it was more that she had something else she was thinking about all the time—something so absorbing that nothing else could command her thoughts.

Finally, one evening when they had gone into the study, he broached the subject.

"Rapunzel, what's bothering you?"

She stopped short and turned around slowly from the box of sketching materials that she had just gone to. He sat in his chair, regarding her with a determined look. She cast her eyes down and bit her lip. "I don't know what you mean," she mumbled.

"I think you do," he said. "Ever since that afternoon when you did that wild experiment, you've been like this. You hardly talk to me. You don't want to do anything. You act like something is always—and I mean _always_—on your mind. What's bothering you?"

She hunched over the box, determined not to look at him. "I... you're right," she finally said. "Something has been on my mind a lot." She began shuffling around inside the box as if she could not find something she was looking for, though he knew that there couldn't be anything in it but paper and her pencils.

"So what is it?" he asked, somewhat impatiently. "Am I also right that it's connected with that last thing you did?"

She visibly jolted at this question. Her movement itself confirmed his guess.

"It is," she got out. "The experiment... I thought it was finished that day, but... I think... there's a lot more to it." She finally drew away from the box and met his gaze with her own. For the first time in days, her attention was fully fixed upon him, but her look was pleading, desperate. "Eugene, I need to go out to my old tower."

Whatever he had been expecting, it was not that. "What?" he exclaimed. "What in the world for?"

"I uncovered some new information," she stammered. "You remember when we went out there, and I hoped we would find all these books that my mother used to bring in?"

He did remember. "Yes," he said hesitantly, "but Rapunzel, I don't understand. You have a lot of books _here_ now, and if that old manuscript—what happened to it, by the way?—said to use them, then they're probably the same ones your mother borrowed."

"Some of them are," she said. "The manuscript... it's not in my possession anymore, but I know where it is." She suddenly turned her face away, as if she had said too much.

He did not miss it, and his mind instantly jumped to the conclusion that she had again been in correspondence with the unknown character whose letter he had seen. "Oh, is that so?" he said acidly. "Who has it, then? Your boyfriend in Transylvania?"

Anger flashed before her eyes. "No, as a matter of fact, he doesn't, and he's no such thing!" she snapped. "I haven't even written to him again—"

"Oh, so it's some other man?" Flynn continued recklessly. He did not know why he was doing this, but the slow boil of irritation that he'd felt was suddenly surging forth. If she had been ignoring him because she was fixated on somebody _else,_ some _other _man, that was just too much.

"I haven't been writing to _any _men!" she raged. "Though I don't understand why you should even care if I did! You don't love me. You've never said it, ever."

"Rapunzel!" He felt as if he had been slapped in the face.

"I'm not as ignorant as I was when I first came here, Eugene. I know why you want me around. You said once that that wasn't all, but then afterward..." Her voice had taken on a sad weariness that he rarely heard from her. "I don't mind it, I really don't... you've treated me well and been very generous with me, and you didn't have to be. I haven't minded giving you what _you _wanted in return... but I know that's all it is for you."

He wanted to stop her, to tell her that she was wrong about what he felt—or didn't feel—for her, but he couldn't make himself do it. He regretted that his behavior after that moment to which she had alluded had indeed convinced her that the assurance was untrue, but he just couldn't have another such moment of weakness _now,_ when she cornered or shamed him into saying it. It offended his pride. So he just sat there, staring miserably at her.

"It's just that I've missed my mother so much," she said—though, strangely, there was no sorrow in her voice, but rather, a suppressed eagerness—"and I want to go back to the tower. There's a cellar of books underneath it, Eugene. That's where they were kept."

With that, she did it again, taking him so much by surprise that he had no idea what to say for several moments. Finally he responded. "What makes you think that?" he croaked.

She hesitated briefly. It would not do to tell him about her secret excursion to the tower in the morning or what she found there, and it certainly would not do to tell him the truth about her last, dramatic experiment in the laboratory, or the stunning, unbelievable outcome of it. "Another colleague of hers—a _female_ one—said so," she said carefully.

He sighed in resignation. "Fine. If you want to go out to the tower, you don't need my permission. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. I have no lawful claim on you." He cast his gaze down at his book, unwilling to acknowledge to himself, let alone to her, that she had shamed him into telling her she could go to the tower (even if she didn't require his permission). He certainly didn't want to admit that he was issuing a dare: _You want to leave? Then leave._ After all, she _might..._

"Thank you, Eugene," she said softly, leaving the room.

He stayed rooted in his chair, listening to her footsteps as she headed up the stairs. Finally he heaved an unhappy sigh and tried to focus on his book—to forget about what had just happened—to push away the idea that he was losing her. It didn't work.

A cold, lightweight set of feet scampered up his arm. Startled, he whipped his head to the side and found himself face-to-face with a pair of lizard eyes. Pascal was perched on his shoulder, turned a deep shade of blue and looking mournful.

"Me too, Pascal," Flynn muttered.

* * *

She was gone by the time he woke up the next morning. A note lay on her pillow, telling him briefly that she had gone out to the tower and would be back by nightfall. He wondered why she had even promised _that._ The night before, she had finally slipped out of her laboratory and crawled into bed beside him, touching his arm, whispering his _nom de guerre_ that he had asked her to use in bed, and saying softly that she was here if he wanted her. After her accusations earlier, and his lack of pushback, her touches and words had made him strangely angry. The last thing he wanted was to respond enthusiastically to them.

Part of him wanted to hold her close and tell her that she meant much more to him than she thought, and yet he could not swallow his pride enough to do it. There was only one choice that would leave him with his ego intact, and he had taken it. He had turned over, shoved her away, and said as savagely as he could, "I don't want you. Now leave me alone, be quiet, and go to sleep." It had felt very satisfying at first as she let out a huff and scooted to the far side of the bed away from him, but before he went to sleep, he realized that she was silently weeping. Regret washed over him immediately. He had rolled over and pulled the covers over his ears to try to muffle the sound, but it had bothered him still.

He sighed and got himself dressed. As he headed downstairs to get breakfast for himself, he nearly tripped on Pascal. "What are you doing here?" he exclaimed as he stooped over to pick up the chameleon. "I didn't think she could find the place without you pointing the way."

Pascal looked contemplative for a moment. Then, to Flynn's utter astonishment, he put his front feet on top of his head, draping his toes down the sides of his face as if they were hair, and bending them, as if it were _curly _hair. This meant absolutely nothing to Flynn. "You're crazy," he said to the lizard, shaking his head. "And apparently so am I to ask you questions and talk to you as if you can answer me." He turned away before he could notice the disapproving frown on Pascal's face.

It was a long, unhappy day for Flynn. He wondered what Rapunzel was doing in that place. It crossed his mind that she might not have any particular purpose, but that being alone in the familiar old tower was preferable to being around him now. As soon as that idea entered his head, he found that he could not dissuade himself from it. In fact, it seemed all too likely to him.

When Attila came by to prepare lunch, he was surprised to see Flynn sitting at the dining table by himself looking so morose. "She upstairs again?" the ruffian asked.

"No," Flynn said glumly. "She's not here."

That surprised Attila. He turned around slowly, and—as he had been many times before—Flynn was glad that he could not see the man's face. "Rider, you're a fool," he said. "I don't know what you said or did to her, but if you're even half a man, you'll go find her, get down on your knees and apologize to her, and take her back."

"She's _coming_ back," Flynn said hotly. The comments stung, but he would not admit that. "She's just doing something today."

Attila was not convinced. "Look," he said, "I may wear this helmet, but it don't block my eyes from seeing what's in front of me." And on that note, he headed into the kitchen without another word.

After lunch, Flynn finally decided to go up to her old laboratory once more. He didn't know why; he knew now that he was not going to find the mysterious tower manuscript, which he was sure held the real clues to what Rapunzel had accomplished, or tried to accomplish. He didn't expect to find any correspondence there either, or her own notes. Most likely, she had brought all of this sensitive material to the tower. Maybe he thought he could somehow imbibe from the atmosphere of the room some clue about what she had done, what all this meant to her. Sighing once more—this was becoming a common occurrence today—he pushed open the door.

The ruined canvas still hung from above the mantelpiece. Though it had lost its aura of life with the destruction of the portrait, the blotchy, stained canvas—occupying a position that should have been occupied by a finished artwork—provided a different form of creepiness to the room now. To Flynn, it was somehow evocative of an empty eye socket.

As he examined the contents of the room, he found that, sure enough, the notes Rapunzel had taken were gone. The box of glassware was as well. An air of neglect now filled the mostly empty room, with its bookcase, two chairs, and battered old table. However, all the books that she had purchased over the summer remained upright on the bookshelves. Flynn strode to the bookcase and took another look at the titles.

The large black volume that he had noticed before her "breakthrough" caught his eye once more. Flynn took this book off the shelf and noticed at once that it had been covered in a plain piece of leather that had not been glued down. That was strange. He opened the book and turned to the title page, which read, in heavy, sinister blackletter, _Ye Necronomicon of Abdul Al-Hazred._

An unaccountable chill crept swiftly down his spine. –No, it wasn't unaccountable. That title—Flynn had heard of this book before from his days as a thief. He thought of nights in shady, disreputable taverns, the kind that often had blood on the floor by night's end, with everyone in the common room bound to secrecy out of fear of the murderer. He had consorted, dealt with, and backstabbed some of the lowest-life characters that could be found on the European continent. He had personally seen knives shoved into throats in dark corners. He had heard the anguished cries of robbery, murder, and rape, and had remained in the shadows rather than risking his own life to act. He had heard eyewitness accounts of dismemberments, disembowelings, and decapitations. Flynn Rider had seen and heard so many things that he would like to forget, but even in such circles as _that, _this title was unmentionable by most, and spoken by those few who dared say it (for one never knew who among that set might have _read it_ and formed an unspeakable alliance) in hushed tones, as if they could never be sure who—or what—might be listening.

And _Rapunzel_ owned it.

What had she _wanted _with it? What could possibly have been in this book that she had needed to know? He shoved the book back in the empty place on the shelf, fingers trembling.

He tried to distract himself for the rest of the day, but could not. At last, when the sky was dark and he was beginning to worry about Rapunzel traveling alone at night, he heard a hesitant knock on the door. He leaped out of his chair in the study and went to answer it.

Rapunzel stood outside the door, looking simultaneously resigned, resentful, and somehow strained. In any case, she did not look happy to be there—but as he silently brought her inside and upstairs to the bedroom, the strain on her face mostly melted away, replaced with relief. That was weird...

"Are you all right?" he asked brusquely.

She glanced up at him and nodded silently before sitting down on the sofa.

"I hope that you accomplished your purpose?"

She nodded again, keeping her eyes on her lap.

This was ridiculous, he thought. They had known each other for weeks. Why the sudden formality? Was she still angry or sad about last night? The thought briefly crossed his mind that he wouldn't blame her if she was, but he was still too proud to apologize to her. Besides, he had something else on his mind now.

"Well, I went into your old laboratory to... clean up," he lied, "and I noticed something." He paused. How to ask the question? Finally he just blurted it out. "Rapunzel, why do you have a copy of the Necronomicon?"

She glanced up sharply but quickly looked away. "It's just a book," she said evasively.

Anger suddenly surged up in him again. Her tone—who did she think she was fooling? Well, he wasn't going to take sideways half-answers for this. "It's not 'just a book,'" he said. "I've heard about it. My own past... well," he said, grinning darkly, "I've never told you all about it, have I?"

She turned pale. "What do you mean?" she asked in a wavery voice.

_Oh, why the hell not?_ he thought. He was feeling reckless right now. It occurred to him that she might run away once she learned the truth about his past, but somehow he was sure that he didn't care. Let her stay in that tower with her creepy old books and make as many flashing lights out there as she wanted... let her turn into a latter-day Gothel Corvinus, for all he cared. If she ran from him because he was a thief with a dark past—or because he actually, at last, had stumbled upon something of her "experiment" that he knew something about—then so be it. If she was so damned sure that she _loved_ him, then he would put it to the test. He certainly wasn't going to love _her_ if her love for him was only conditional—but she need not know that.

"You want to know how I got the money to buy this place and fix it up, Rapunzel?" he hissed. "You want to know what funds have been sitting in banks gathering interest that's paid for your clothes and your food and your collection of demonic literature down the hall? I _stole_ things." Her mouth dropped open in shock, but he continued recklessly ahead. "I stole valuables from all over the place. That's what has been feeding and clothing you."

She stood stock-still, taking it in, unable to speak, but he did not pick up on obvious disapproval. He continued, "And when I was a rogue thief, living on the edge, I consorted with people that would chill you to hear about. The worst of the worst. But even _they _knew that this book was bad business. Now, tell me the truth about this or go back to your God-forsaken tower. _What do you have it for?"_

Finally, in broken tones, she spoke. "I know what most of it is," she said. "I know that—it contains... evil instructions. I looked through it. But Eugene—"

_That name again,_ he thought, as anger flashed over him once more.

"—I haven't tried _anything _out of it except _one formula._ I _promise._ You heard me saying it that day. I needed the words to do _one thing. _That's _all."_

"And what was that thing?"

She hesitated, her breath catching in her chest. "I—please don't, Eugene. Please."

"You do this in my house, then I have a right to know what it is," he said coldly.

She gazed desperately at him for one brief moment before bursting out, "Why does it _matter?_ I haven't done anything evil, Eugene! It was something my mother was working on! Do you think she's a—_was_ a bad person?" she corrected herself hastily. "I know most of that book is evil, but this wasn't!"

"Then tell me what it was!"

"It's a transformation spell!" she gasped out. "That's all it is! Are you happy now?"

"Spell?" he exclaimed.

"Some alchemy works, all right?" she said. "All those chemicals—I mixed them up in certain ways, and this formula helped transform them! It's an incredible breakthrough, Eugene! I just—it's been so amazing, I can hardly believe it myself sometimes, and it's just not easy to talk about."

He was stunned into silence. "So what were you doing in the tower all day?" he said in a surprisingly harsh tone.

She seemed to clam up before his eyes. "Reading," she said shortly. "I found the book cellar."

"Reading what, more occult books?" He didn't know why he was persisting in this—why this was so _important_ to him—but for some reason that he would not say, the idea of Rapunzel being involved, or even potentially involved, with something so dark that even _his _old cohort feared it roused and riled something very primal in him.

"If I was, are you going to send me away for that?" she asked. "After all your years of thieving and consorting with criminals, you dare judge me for what I _read?"_

"No, I'm worried about you getting involved in something dangerous that I couldn't protect you from."

The words slipped out before he thought about their implications, and they seemed to hit him and Rapunzel at the same time. A satisfied, smug grin formed on her face.

Flynn could not think straight anymore. His mind was contorting itself in knots trying to account for why the idea of Rapunzel endangering herself upset him so much, and he would not, could not, admit the truth—to either of them. He needed something else to think about, something to take his mind off this. "Enough of this," he said roughly. "Take off your clothes and get into bed."

"_What?"_ she exclaimed.

"You heard me." He was pleased that his sudden demand had taken her aback so much that it had wiped the smugness right off her face. Encouraged, he leered out at her and began to unbutton his own doublet.

"You didn't want me last night," she said spitefully—but he noticed that she started to unbutton the back of her dress nonetheless.

"You're right," he said. "I didn't. But I want you tonight—so get them off."

"Do you think I'm going to be at your beck and call?"

He smirked as he shed his shirt. "For this? Yes, that's exactly what I think. You wrote on your note this morning that you would be back—and here you are. You didn't have to return if you didn't want to."

"You know why I did," she admitted, but the comment—and the implicit meaning behind it—was more a weapon than a confession. "You know why I did... and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for taking advantage of that." She finished unbuttoning her dress and cast it to the floor as she stood up. She crossed the room in her underclothes and stood before him, staring hard at him.

He knew that she was silently daring him to go through with this, but he would call her bluff. "I'm not, though," he said through a smirk. He unbuckled his pants and stepped out of them as they hit the floor. Suddenly, roughly, he whirled her around and pushed her facedown on the bed. She was surprisingly compliant as he began violently pulling at the laces on her corset, breaking them at one point, but he supposed she wanted to avoid provoking him to use the confining undergarment as a control device, as he had once before. But when he had the corset tossed aside and she _still _wasn't fighting, he didn't know what to think.

"I know you're not," she whispered from underneath him as he pulled down her drawers. "And I think I know _why _you're not, too. You gave yourself away before... _Eugene,"_ she said, defiantly using the name he had asked her not to use in this situation.

_Damn her,_ he thought. He had intended to _forget _about that moment of weakness. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said snidely. Forcefully—as if to prove the point, whether to himself or to her—he gripped her hips and thrust hard into her.

She gave a gasp, but managed to get out, "You know, it's amazing you were ever a successful criminal. You're not _nearly _as good a liar as you think you are."

It was true, he knew it was true, and he couldn't stand that _she _now knew it was true. He didn't want the responsibility to her that came with this. He couldn't handle it. She was headstrong, determined, and clearly had some motivation or loyalty driving her "experimental" work that was so strong he could not hope to overcome it. Of course, it was the loyalty to her dead mother. What could he do against that? _Nothing,_ he was sure. He already felt the aching fear that she would—perhaps already had—become involved in something that would end up hurting her beyond his ability to fix it. He could surrender to what he felt, but it was also surrendering to the fear for her and the terrible knowledge that he could not stop the danger—a danger that he could not even name, but which had become so much more tangible since he saw that evil book—unless she _did _change her primary loyalty and opened up fully to him.

"Neither are you," he said, withdrawing and shoving back in hard, making her gasp again. It was the only thing he was thinking that he could stand to tell her right now.

She couldn't reply—neither of them could say anything coherent now—and as he continued, she responded more and more, letting out little grunts and gasps at his movements, twisting beneath him as she needed to.

He had hoped that by doing this deed this particular way, he could convince himself—however temporarily—that it was still essentially meaningless. Just another dirty fuck with his mistress. But he couldn't believe that now. He might _rebel _against what he felt, he might _hate _that he felt it—indeed, the ferocity and resentment that he poured into his motions seemed to signify that hatred quite well—but for the first time, he acknowledged it.

In the past, they had climaxed basically independently of each other even if it happened at the same time. He was in control of when he got himself off, and he had the strong impression that it was similar with her. He certainly couldn't recall making a special effort to make her come. She had managed it herself after their first time. This time, he did take notice—though it was not out of affection for her, or not entirely, at least. With love and hatred of love mixed so completely in his mind, the barely comprehensible feeling he had was that he wanted to wring it out of her—to _make _her feel it—to control her sensations. And he realized, vaguely, through a fog of lust, that if he did feel this, he didn't really want to come for her. Under _this _circumstance, that was ceding far too much power to her. He struggled against the tidal wave building in him, but it was far too late to stop by then. With a cry and a single clench of her muscles around him, she wrung it from him just as he did from her. He gasped out her name helplessly as he came.

They had taken each other apart, but as they separated and he rolled off her, both of them breathing heavily, it didn't seem necessary to acknowledge it openly. As much as _he_ didn't want to admit it, and as unsure as they both were about what would remain the next morning, they both knew, at that moment on that night, what had just happened.

* * *

**End Note:** The "horror" part of this story picks up in the next chapter.


	8. A Stranger and a Threat

**Author's Note**: Thanks to everyone for the continued interest in the story! This chapter drops several whopping clues about what's going on.

* * *

**Chapter Eight: A Stranger and a Threat**

* * *

Rapunzel woke up before dawn once again, carefully slipped out of bed, and got dressed. She wrote a note for Eugene, which she left on the pillow, but by the time she had finished this, she noticed with alarm that the sky was starting to change. She had to be out of the house before he saw her leaving.

She quickly shuffled down the hallway, opened the door to the laboratory without making a sound, and emerged with an armful of carefully chosen books—including the Necronomicon. She quietly carried these downstairs and into the ancient medieval dining hall, a room that she and Eugene never used because its stone walls, banquet table, mounted dead animals, heavy drapery, and iron chandelier were altogether too sinister and imposing for normal mealtime conversation. The room and its windows were on the west side of the house too, which meant that at this hour, it was still very dark, adding an extra level of unpleasantness to the whole atmosphere.

Rapunzel walked to a certain point on the north wall where a projection protruded into the room about three feet. She set down the books and peered around to make doubly sure that she was alone. Breathing a sigh of relief, she put her hands on the right corner of the protrusion and pushed leftward.

One day shortly after she had first come to live here, Flynn had given her the formal tour of the house. This particular projection, he said, was probably an ancient chimney stack that had been walled up at some point, since it did not correspond to an indentation in the room on the other side of this wall. Indeed, the grand hearth of the dining hall was exactly opposite this projection on the south wall, suggesting that there might have once been a second hearth on this side. At the time, Rapunzel had paid little attention to this unremarkable feature, and she had not questioned this theory.

–Until it was proven completely, utterly false. What appeared at first glance to be a thick wall of stone was, on that side, an inch-thick sheet that had been so carefully cut that it was almost impossible to tell that there _was _a straight, vertical, hairline fracture.

The thin sheet of wall slid away up to about eight feet high, exposing a stone staircase that headed down to the west—underground, beneath the house. Rapunzel picked up the books again, stepped onto the small landing at the top of the staircase, and quickly glanced around.

The figure she was waiting for was standing three stairs down, hooded in black and holding a lantern that gave off a greenish light. Silently the other person held out the light, illuminating a heavy handle on the interior side of the thin wall. Rapunzel grabbed this handle and slid the wall back in place, enclosing both of them in near darkness. The other person began to walk downstairs, not saying a word. Taking a deep breath, Rapunzel followed behind, farther and farther down.

"I trust you picked up the correct books." The voice was female and very cold.

Rapunzel's breath caught in her chest. "Yes," she said simply.

"I do hope that the squatter doesn't notice that they're gone."

Rapunzel felt a flash of anger at the reference to Eugene as a squatter, but she did not dare reply to it.

"Has he been poking around in your experimental room again?"

Rapunzel didn't want to answer, but she had no choice. "Yes," she admitted. "He noticed the Necronomicon in particular... and he knew about it." They reached the bottom of the stairs at last and began walking down the earthen hallway, which continued ahead farther than either of them could see.

The woman sucked in her breath in displeasure. "I hope you were able to hold him off."

"I was," Rapunzel quickly assured her. "I didn't even need to lie, really. I _haven't _done any of the really bad things in it."

The woman laughed, as if Rapunzel's sense of morality was highly amusing to her. "Tell him whatever you need to, but remember what you promised me. I'm _disappointed _that you immediately became a whore for a scoundrel as soon as you left home, but I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Just remember the pact we made yesterday. You may keep him as long as he remains in the dark. If he ever finds out too much, I'm afraid he will have to be eliminated."

The words were spoken matter-of-factly, but there was still a sardonic, amused edge to them, as if the woman were taking great enjoyment in tormenting Rapunzel with the insults and threat. Rapunzel gritted her teeth in anger, but she still did not dare respond as they continued down the dark subterranean corridor.

"I have quite a treat for you today, my dear," the woman said. "I was able to acquire the twins last night, and I'm going to use them as our test case for the next stage."

"The next stage?" Rapunzel whispered. She had a really bad feeling that she knew what this woman was talking about, but she hoped she was wrong.

"Why yes. I think it's time we worked out how to raise them up in a modified, easily controllable form. You have done very well so far, and I think I should reward that, even despite the hair-cutting business."

Rapunzel continued down the underground corridor. A feeling of growing nausea and despair was settling in the pit of her stomach. This was not what she had bargained for when she started her work—but she had no idea how to get out of it now.

* * *

When Flynn woke up, he was almost relieved to find himself in an empty bed. Last night had taken a toll on him, emotionally, and he really did not want to have to immediately face Rapunzel after it. Then he noticed the note and read it. In this note, she had not promised to return by nightfall. He didn't know why, but this bothered him.

Under Pascal's mournful eye, he threw on some clothes. "I don't know what her problem is either, frog," he snapped, annoyed with the reproachful look that the creature was giving him. He didn't think _he_ was to blame for this. Pascal frowned angrily at him and reared back to come running at him. Flynn instantly realized what would happen to his ear if the chameleon climbed up his body, and he did not want it to happen. "Sorry, sorry," he said quickly. This seemed to mollify the chameleon.

When he emerged into the hallway, he happened to glance toward the other end of it. Light poured into the dark corridor through an open door—Rapunzel's old laboratory. She had apparently been in there and had left the door open. Intrigued, Flynn headed down the hall and went into the room.

The first thing he noticed was that several books were missing. Whereas formerly, two whole bookshelves had been packed solid, there were now several gaps. Flynn could not say exactly what books she had taken with her to the tower... except one. The Necronomicon was definitely gone, he noticed. The idea brought a frown to his face. _She wants it out of the house before I read it too closely,_ he thought. _Either that or she's planning to try something else out of it at that tower._ At once, Flynn resolved to make a trip of his own to the tower.

Pascal seemed to understand his plan. After he quickly scarfed down some breakfast, the chameleon leaped onto his shoulder and stared meaningfully at him.

"You really have chosen me over her, haven't you?" he said in wonder. "Why? Does she freak you out too?" It was said half in jest, but inside he wondered if it might be true.

With Pascal pointing the way, Flynn arrived at the tower in good time. He stood outside, gazing up at the structure thoughtfully. There were no flashing lights from the windows, no screaming chants. In fact, the place did not seem to be occupied at all. Flynn entered the clearing, pushing aside the vine curtain, and strode toward the edifice.

"Rapunzel!" he called out loudly as he marched forward.

As if in response, there was a sudden thunder-like rumble—but it did not come from the tower. It seemed to be coming from under the ground, almost directly where Flynn was standing. He stopped cold and looked around in bewilderment.

"Rapunzel!" he called again, more sternly.

There was a sharper, more regular and repetitive rumble from under the ground, like muffled footfalls. Flynn recalled what Rapunzel had told him about a book cellar. Was that where she was? The idea somehow unsettled him.

The muffled running continued. Flynn kept walking toward the tower, and when he rounded the corner to face the ground-level entrance, he was immediately met with not one, but two, people standing on what appeared to be a completely solid stone floor and facing him. One of them was Rapunzel, who looked flustered, haggard, and deeply stressed. The other face seemed somewhat familiar to him, but he couldn't quite place it. It was that of a relatively young woman, with wide gray eyes that were hidden behind a pair of slightly tinted glasses. Her hair, which appeared to be black, was piled high on her head, tied up in a bun, and hidden underneath a wide-brimmed black hat. The woman herself was garbed in dark gray, and she smiled out arrogantly.

"Eugene," Rapunzel said, sounding nervous and harassed, "what are you doing here?" There was a tone of definite worry in her voice.

He raised an eyebrow. "I just thought I might check on you," he said.

"Oh," she said, looking down. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead. She took a deep, shaky breath, and looked up to face him again. "Well, it's nice to see you. This... this is an old associate of my mother, Madame Elaine." She furtively glanced at the older woman as if seeking approval. "M—Madame, this is Eugene. I've told you about him, of course."

The woman regarded him with a faintly sinister smirk as she silently extended her hand. Flynn almost didn't want to take the woman's hand. Now that he had a closer look at her, he noticed that there was something _off _about her skin. It didn't seem... _fine_ enough. Her pores seemed somehow too large. When he reluctantly shook her hand, he was not at all surprised to find that it was very, very dry and coarse, almost as if it were coated with powder. He quickly withdrew from the handshake, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. He _really _didn't want to meet the woman's eyes.

"Do you want something to eat, Eugene?" Rapunzel asked anxiously.

"Sure," he said, "but I didn't think there was food out here."

"Mo—Madame brought some," she said.

All three of them headed up the stairs and into the tower. The older woman still spoke not a word, which puzzled and alarmed him. Everything about this situation seemed wrong. Rapunzel seemed afraid of this woman, and if Flynn were honest with himself, he couldn't blame her. She gave him the creeps too. He resolved to have a word with Rapunzel if he could catch her alone.

They emerged into the tower. Flynn noticed at once that it had been cleaned up and organized, so it actually looked as if someone was living here again. "So," he said, noting with dismay that his voice was faintly squeaky, "Madame—are you living here?"

"Yes," she answered, finally speaking—though now that he had gotten her to talk, he wished he hadn't. Her voice made the hair on Flynn's neck stand on end. It was a disconcerting mix of sardonic amusement, contempt, treacly simper, and menacing threat. And not even remotely French, despite her name and supposed title.

"Well," he continued, still squeaking faintly, "it looks really nice now." He paused; the woman was getting out some loaves of bread from a basket and ladling some kind of soup from a large pot over the fireplace. "Are you the one who has this old manuscript that I found—"

"Yes," the woman again said curtly.

Flynn was too nervous to ask anything else. He kept an eye on Rapunzel as this woman poured out the bowls of soup—_two_ bowls, he noticed—and set down slices of bread for two. She poured some water from a pitcher into two cups and stood aside, glaring at the small table.

"Aren't you going to eat?" he asked her.

"I do not require food," she said coldly.

He gave up. Clearly this woman did not like him, and he was not going to get anywhere trying to be polite. He and Rapunzel sat down at the table and lunched in silence under the sinisterly watchful eye of "Madame Elaine," _if that's really her name,_ Flynn thought. Pascal stayed on his shoulder the whole time, digging his scaly feet into his doublet as if he were afraid that the woman would pull him off and throw him into the pot. _Which she might,_ Flynn thought darkly.

After they were finished, he tried to usher Rapunzel into her mother's old bedroom for a private word, but the woman followed them silently and stood in the doorway, glaring at the pair. Flynn realized that he was not going to get to ask her about this situation, but to make it appear that he had _some _reason for taking Rapunzel in here, he asked her if she was planning to return to the house tonight, since she hadn't said so on her note.

Relief seemed to flood Rapunzel's face at this question. "Do you want me to come back?" she asked hopefully.

"Yes," he said emphatically. "I do."

She didn't answer for a moment, and a shadow seemed to cross her face. Flynn whirled around and noticed that Madame Elaine was glaring right into Rapunzel's eyes. He frowned back at her. Enough was enough, he thought. He was not going to be bullied by some woman from who-knows-where, and he definitely wasn't going to let this woman take Rapunzel away from him when she was clearly intimidated in the older woman's presence—not that he could blame her—and preferred his company.

"All right," Rapunzel said in a small voice. "I'll do my best."

That did not sound like a commitment to Flynn, and he instantly concluded that the woman would exert pressure on Rapunzel to stay in the tower overnight. He had a terrible feeling, too, that Rapunzel would give in.

"That's good," he said, trying to sound happier than he felt. "Now, what about this book cellar? Might I have a look at it?"

"No," Madame Elaine spoke again. "We have something going on in there right now that can't be disturbed. You should get back to that house you live in."

What kind of phrasing was _that?_ he thought. "That house you live in"? It was almost as if she was insinuating that the house was not lawfully his—and yet she presumed to withhold permission from him to see something that was technically a part of the tower, which she didn't even own herself. He regarded her evenly. "I don't know exactly who you think you are," he said tightly, "but I was asking the _owner _of the tower. The tower belongs to Rapunzel, since her mother passed away."

The woman's eyes flashed at this comment, but only for a fraction of a second. Her mouth quickly curled into a half-smile, half-sneer. "But Rapunzel would say the same," she said. "Wouldn't you, dear?"

Rapunzel cast her gaze down at the floor and nodded swiftly. "It's not a good time, Eugene," she said nervously. "I'll see you soon, all right?"

"Right... see you soon," he echoed and headed toward the stairs. The older woman followed him and stood at the top as he walked down, apparently making sure that he didn't come back up.

He had recognized that the meeting was at an end, fruitless as it was. –No, not entirely fruitless. He had not seen the book cellar, but that really didn't matter in view of what he _had _seen. He had heard enough from this menacing associate to know that something had to be done. This was a person that he did not want to think about reading the Necronomicon, but he had a terrible feeling that Rapunzel had brought the book out here for _her, _rather than herself. As for why Rapunzel had associated herself with the woman, Flynn figured that most likely she had been drawn to anyone that her late mother had known, seeking out connections to the lady who had cared for her all her life as obsessively as she had sought out the unfinished work of her mother, but this was too much. Rapunzel was clearly working with this woman against her own will, held there under some kind of threat. It was blatantly obvious to him that she was scared of the woman.

He passed into the sunlight once again when he reached the bottom of the stairs and headed through the curtain of vines, which hid him from view of anyone in the tower clearing. However, he didn't continue on his trek. Instead he waited next to the vines, putting an ear against them to listen. Before long, he heard a sound like a heavy stone being lifted up and scraping against other stones. _The opening to the cellar is under the entrance to the tower,_ he thought at once. He remembered the engraved central stone. That stone must lift up, he realized.

He made it back to the house in good time, but the closing remarks of the interview had discouraged him from expecting Rapunzel to return that evening—and sure enough, she did not come back that night.

As he finally gave up on it and climbed into the empty bed, he resolved to put a stop to this, but he would have backup. He would enlist some of the ruffians from the inn the next day.

* * *

Rapunzel was still gone the following morning. Flynn tried to suppress the concern that he felt at the thought of her alone with this Madame Elaine, but it was difficult. He grabbed a quick breakfast and threw on his traveling cloak—it was becoming chillier—before heading out the door and walking toward the Snuggly Duckling.

As he walked into the pub, he noticed that the usual daytime crowd was there, though some of them seemed to be not quite awake. Ignoring these ruffians, he sat down at the bar and ordered apple cider. It was far too early in the day to drink anything hard.

The music stopped. "Where's your girl?" Hookhand spoke up from the battered old instrument. Flynn gaped at the ruffian in amazement.

"I told 'em about it," Attila said gruffly. "She still ain't back?"

"She's been back, but she's gone again," Flynn admitted reluctantly.

The ruffians and thugs regarded him with open derision. "And you've come in here to drown your sorrows, I take it?" Hookhand sneered.

"No, that is _not _why I'm here!" Flynn said hotly. "I—"

He broke off as a short, aged man dressed in a ruffian Cupid suit hobbled into the pub. Ordinarily Shorty would be a harmless, half-crazy pub regular who regaled the crowd with outlandish tales and interrupted conversations with inappropriate comments, but today he looked fearful of something.

"What's the problem, Shorty?" Big Nose chuckled, hoisting the old man onto a bar stool. "Had a bad dream about a vampire again?"

The old man lolled his head toward the big-nosed ruffian. "The twins," he managed to get out. "Saw 'em in the woods."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Hookhand said, laughing. "What twins?"

"Redhead twins," Shorty said. "Carrying a big ol' box deep into the woods."

The mention of redheaded twins triggered a memory of the Stabbington brothers in Flynn's mind, since he had once considered working with them. But they were dead, hanged by the city for capital crimes.

Still... Flynn had been unnerved enough by Rapunzel's occult activities of late, as well as by the apparent new possessor of the Necronomicon, that he had a bad feeling about the old man's report even though it surely had to refer to some other set of redheaded twins.

He turned to Shorty. "Were they big and burly?" he asked.

"Don't encourage him, Rider," Hookhand muttered.

Shorty, however, did not seem to mark Hookhand's comment at all. "Yeah," he answered to Flynn. "Big, burly. One of 'em had only one eye. Passed right by me and acted like they couldn't even see I was there. Can you believe that?"

"That's because _they _weren't there," Hookhand said cynically.

"They were too."

"Oh, give it a rest, you old fool," Vladamir said to the old man. He turned to Flynn. "And I agree, stop encouraging him." He paused to glare at Flynn before saying, "And didn't you say you had some reason for being here? I ain't seen any."

Flynn glared back. "I was hoping I could get somebody to come with me out to... this place where Rapunzel—my girl, as you say—is staying, and persuade her to come back."

The entire pub erupted into raucous laughter. Hookhand was the first to get a word in through guffaws. "That's a hoot, Rider! You ran off your girl and now you want _us _to help get her back for you? Go out to wherever she is and talk to her yourself. You're a pathetic excuse for a man."

"You don't understand!" he roared back, smarting from the insult. "She's listening to this woman, this stranger, who I think is threatening her."

"So you need our help to go talk to some old woman," Hookhand said through renewed laughs. "If you think that's any better, well, Rider, it ain't."

Flynn finished off the last of his cider and slammed the cup down on the counter. "Fine!" he exclaimed, getting off the bar stool. "I'll make sure to remember this! And you," he said, turning to Attila as if uttering a malediction, "you can stay in here for the day. Don't even bother coming around."

He stormed angrily out of the pub, infuriated over what kind of reception he had gotten from the ruffians, and completely forgetting the conversation he'd had with Shorty. He headed back to his house and stalked into the study, slamming the door behind him even though he knew no one was around to disturb him. Pascal, who was lurking in the room on the side table next to Flynn's favorite chair, hunched over in alarm at the man's rage.

Rapunzel did not return this day either. By the time evening rolled around once more, Flynn had cooled off and remembered his conversation with Shorty. The darkness, his earlier worries about that conversation, and his ongoing concern about Rapunzel's activities and associations left him in a deep state of anxiety over her. He resolved to go out to the tower the next day.

* * *

Rapunzel crept quietly up the set of stone stairs, reaching the top at last. She set down her lantern on the stone floor, where it illuminated the heavy iron bar that served as a handle. She gripped the handle and forced the section of wall to the side, knowing that it would not fall over from the groove that had been carefully carved at the top and the matching ridge on the underside of the wall segment above the secret door. She picked up the lantern again, closed the panel, and set the lantern down once more on the dining hall floor. Taking off her shoes, she padded silently upstairs, hoping that Eugene had left the bedroom door open.

He had, and there were no candles or lamps lit in the room, indicating that he was asleep, just as he ought to be at three in the morning. She crept softly inside and stood over his bedside. He was asleep, all right. The light of the moon illuminated his face, so peaceful in sleep. Rapunzel stood there, watching him sleep, observing the regular movement of his chest. Tears formed in her eyes.

She wanted so badly to climb in there with him, to curl up against him and feel his arms wrap around her, just as she had done so many nights before everything changed. Before she had gotten exactly what she wanted and had worked so hard to achieve. But she couldn't. She couldn't get in bed, because it would surely wake him up, and then he would not let her leave again. She _had _to leave. She could _not _be found missing when the inhabitant of the tower woke up. She loved him, and she had to keep him safe. _She _was safe; she was confident that her associate would never harm her, but she had made a direct threat to Eugene.

After watching him sleep for about half an hour, Rapunzel felt the tears finally coursing down her cheeks. She was about to lose control, and she knew that it was now time to go. Stepping out of the room and down the stairs just as silently as she had before, she went back into the dining hall, picked up the lantern, and slipped into the secret passage, making sure the door was closed completely when she left.


	9. A Menace and a Desecration

**Chapter Nine: A Menace and a Desecration**

* * *

Flynn got up the next day resolved to go to the tower even if he had to go alone. He was completely unaware of Rapunzel's nocturnal visit the night before—though even if he had known, he would still have been determined to make the trip. Somehow, the concerns he had had about being too protective of Rapunzel, how she would take it, and what it would imply about his feelings, had lifted. He felt the overwhelming sense that if things continued as they had been, with her spending more and more time at the tower with that woman, then he would lose her for good. Whatever his personal problems might be—and he halfway expected them to resurface if he did succeed in bringing Rapunzel back to his house, though he would deal with that if and when it happened—they were far less important than her safety, he decided.

With Pascal on his shoulder, he set out for the tower as soon as he could. This trip was becoming more familiar to him. He had always had a good sense of direction, having had to live on the run for so many years and evade authorities, and he supposed that if he came out here too many more times, he would have the path imprinted in his mind. Of course, he didn't intend for that to happen; he planned to get her back.

Along the way, he passed through a dark part of the forest where the canopy hid virtually all of the sunlight. His own shadow vanished into the ground before him. A slight sense of unease crept over his body, a vague feeling of being watched. Nervously he glanced around as he continued his walk.

Suddenly a twig nearby snapped. He whirled his head around to find the source, even as a shuffling noise reached his ears. As he turned, he saw the leaves of a large bush moving as if something had just jumped into, or around, the shrub. Then the bush went still again.

"All right," he muttered to himself, "calm down. It's just an animal."

However, his nerves remained on edge for the remainder of the trip.

When he arrived at the tower, he discovered to his surprise that Rapunzel was waiting for him in the clearing. A look of extreme anxiety and strain filled her face.

"Eugene," she said before he could even speak, "you really have no need to come out here."

For a second he was extremely affronted, but his vague fears for her took over at once. "I do too," he said. "I'm worried about you, Rapunzel. You haven't been to the house in several days. I miss you"—_might as well admit it,_ he thought—"and I'm worried that this woman is pressuring you to stay out here when you don't want to."

Rapunzel looked startled for a moment. "Why would you think that?" she exclaimed squeakily.

"Because every time I've seen you since you started coming out here, you've looked nervous and strained. Because that woman watched you like a hawk when I came by before. Because she could hardly wait to see me gone, and you were obviously too afraid of her to protest."

Rapunzel turned pink and started breathing heavily.

"You don't have to do her bidding, Rapunzel," he said in a gentler tone. "This tower is your property. You can order her out if she's pressuring you to do experiments you don't want to do. I'll back you up if you want... and you and I can even go by the Snuggly Duckling and enlist help." Flynn recalled his bad experience at the pub, but he figured that the ruffians would be more inclined to help _her _than him.

Rapunzel took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. "Eugene, I—you've got it all wrong," she said. "She's not threatening me. She just... doesn't trust men. It's not personal."

Flynn regarded her skeptically. "Rapunzel, why would it be _so important_ to you to do whatever she's having you do?" It was clear to him that Madame Elaine, rather than Rapunzel, had become the dominant force in whatever experiments they were conducting.

"It was my mother's research," Rapunzel mumbled, looking at the ground.

"But colleagues always have their own personal researches," Flynn insisted. "Even if they're working together on some general topic, they have their own interests. How do you know that this woman isn't just using you for _her _research?"

Rapunzel turned deeply pink again and fell silent. Flynn realized that he had hit a nerve with this question—though the fact did not make him happy.

He spoke again. "But actually, it doesn't matter whether she is or not. I just wish you would come back. I don't think you're happy out here, whatever you may say, and that's reason enough to stop your involvement with this woman."

"I can't," she said in a voice barely above a whisper. She turned away.

He put a hand firmly on her shoulder before she could walk away. "Why can't you?" he said harshly.

Rapunzel pulled away. "I have to stay," she said. "I wish I could explain it to you"—she looked truly sincere in saying this, Flynn noticed—"but I... there are things I just can't... Eugene, please don't come out here again. _Please."_ Her plea was heartfelt, but it was filled with deep misery—and fear.

He noticed the misery and fear in her words, but at the moment, he felt more anger and despair for his own situation. That sounded altogether too much like a rejection of him. He finally got command of his words and said, "So you aren't coming back?"

Rapunzel's eyes grew wide in pain. "I don't know," she whispered. Her voice broke at the last, and, shielding her eyes, she dashed away toward the tower.

Stunned, feeling as though he had been slapped in the face, Flynn stood mute for a minute, half expecting her to come back out. When she did not, he finally heaved an unhappy sigh and turned away from the tower, heading back into the woods. He heard another, smaller, squeakier unhappy sigh from the creature resting on his shoulder and craned his neck to catch Pascal's eye. The lizard, he noticed, was blue. Appropriate.

Along the way he thought about the meeting. He had not heard anything to disabuse him of his prior beliefs regarding Rapunzel's associate, not even her parting words. They were not the words of a jilting lover who was weary of him, but of a person who felt trapped into saying them. There had been fear in that final plea. It seemed clear enough to him that Madame Elaine regarded him as a problem, or potential problem, and it was quite likely based on Rapunzel's tone that there had been threats to his safety if he came by the tower regularly. The woman had taken over the "research," quite possibly even changed its direction entirely to something with which Rapunzel was not comfortable (for Flynn was very sure that _she _had been the one to ask for the Necronomicon), and was bullying and intimidating Rapunzel into staying there to help her with it. It was distinctly possible that Rapunzel didn't even know what her associate was _really _doing, Flynn thought. She might be using Rapunzel for grunt work and labor, all the while poisoning her against "men" and making threats against him.

He realized that, in order to get Rapunzel back, he would certainly need to confront the woman. He might even need to be prepared for violence. And if it really came to it... but Flynn felt queasy at that thought. Only one person had ever lost his life at Flynn's hands, and that had been an act of self-defense. He would not think about this just yet.

About three-fourths of the way back to his house, Flynn changed his path, taking a well-worn shortcut through the woods that he knew would lead to the Snuggly Duckling. It was not quite afternoon, but he decided that he needed a drink already.

He finally reached the end of the trail and walked into the pub. The usual day crowd was there, and he steeled himself for taunts and insults (considering the reception he'd had the last time he was in here), but to his surprise, they all looked deeply disturbed.

A couple of ruffians greeted him with dull-sounding acknowledgments of his assumed surname, but otherwise no one paid him much mind. Flynn sat down at the bar and ordered a stein of ale, which the bartender delivered to him somewhat listlessly. Flynn stared around the pub. Something was wrong with the crowd today. No one was paying much attention to anyone else. They all looked lost in thought, a state of affairs very unusual for this group.

"What's going on?" he asked curiously, staring out at them, gazing from face to face.

At last someone spoke. "I guess we should've listened to Shorty yesterday," Big Nose said.

Suddenly the tale that Shorty had told about the redheads with the long box filled Flynn's mind once again. A shudder rippled down his back at the memory. "What, you saw them too?" he asked nervously.

"We all did," Big Nose said. "We were coming back from the city last night—a lot of us needed new supplies for our private hobbies—and as we were passing over the footbridge, we saw a boat with two men in it and a whole big stack of boxes."

Flynn was skeptical. "But how do you know it was the same two that Shorty thinks he saw?"

"I did see them," Shorty objected from under a table somewhere. No one paid him any mind, and Big Nose continued with his narrative.

"Because I pointed at them and whispered to the others to look at them," Big Nose said in an affronted voice, "and we all did. It sure did look like the brothers—you know who I mean," he said nervously to Flynn, who nodded. "But there was something not quite right about them for it to be them," the ruffian continued. "Their faces looked, I don't know, kind of _dead."_

"The Stabbingtons _are _dead," Flynn put in with a smirk. Maybe it was the sheer horror of what they were suggesting, coupled with the fact that he had just returned from that tower with its sinister incumbent and her cache of evil books, but he really felt the need right now to scoff and laugh at the idea. The alternative was simply too awful to contemplate.

Big Nose frowned. "You're a real smart-ass, Rider. You know what I mean. Whoever they were, their faces looked like there was no person behind 'em. No will. Their eyes were glassy, no spark. I was real quiet whispering about them to the others, but it didn't matter, because I don't think they even noticed we were there—just like Shorty said when he saw them."

"That's right," Shorty agreed from wherever he was hiding. This was followed by a crash, as if the little old man could not stand on his own feet.

The pub lapsed into silence again. Flynn tried to suppress his own thoughts, as they quickly began to take a most unwanted direction. The encounter must have been truly disturbing for this entire room full of hardened ruffians to be so visibly uneasy about it. Flynn did not like the thought at all. His existing suspicions of Madame Elaine had made him draw an immediate connection between these two characters, whoever they were, and her. And if _she _was involved, then Rapunzel was involved, most certainly against her will. No wonder she looked so nervous and anxious, if her dubious "associate" had taken to hiring creepy thugs to do—what? Transport "large boxes" of something to the tower, obviously, but what? More chemical supplies?

Flynn gulped down his drink and sprang up to go. "Well," he said, "I'll keep my eyes open for them, and maybe try to figure out what they're doing and who they answer to."

"Be careful if you do," Hookhand said. Flynn glanced up in surprise; it was rare that any of the ruffians expressed any concern for him, but this was sincere. He gave the ruffian a grateful look as he left the pub.

* * *

For the rest of the day, Flynn sat brooding in the house, working out plans for confronting Madame Elaine. The existence of thugs in the equation was a complicating factor now, and while Flynn was reasonably confident that he could take on the woman alone, he knew he could not take on two large thugs _and _the woman. At this point, he realized, any plan of confrontation would have to involve the Snuggly Duckling crew as backup, and he was not at all sure that they would be inclined to go out to the tower to take on the woman without solid proof that the thugs were linked to her. He realized that he would probably have to be the one to obtain that.

He decided to sneak out at nightfall and wait outside the tower. The woman had wanted Rapunzel to remain at the tower at night for a reason, and he had strong suspicions that _her _work, at least, was done at least partially at night, while Rapunzel slept. The thugs, too, had been sighted by the Duckling crowd rowing a box-laden boat at nightfall. It seemed to be the most likely time that Flynn would see anything, any meeting that proved the connection.

Grabbing his black traveling cloak, he shuffled down the stairs for the front door. Pascal scurried behind him on the stone floor. He stopped and turned around. "Not tonight, Pascal," he said. "I know how to get there now, and I don't want you to be put in harm's way." The chameleon scowled but consented, stopping in his tracks and giving the man a parting look.

As Flynn headed through the woods for the third time, he quickly came to regret telling the chameleon to stay at home. He knew as well as anyone in the woodland village that walking alone at night was risky, especially through the woods. Liquor blockaders operated at night, though the smugglers were rarely seen. It was rumored that there was a network of tunnels from various aboveground outlets, both currently and formerly associated with stills, which culminated in the Snuggly Duckling. Flynn did not really doubt that, but he also knew that raiders and highwaymen operated along these trails at night. _How hilarious that I'm worried about running into a thief in the woods,_ he thought wryly. But at this point, he knew he had enemies—thieves who resented his success at breaking into wealthy homes and stealing from them. He had a list of thefts ranging from the crown of the local ex-lord's stolen baby all the way to his _real _crowning theft, a medieval heirloom of the House of Hapsburg. His former compatriots in illicit property acquisition had been envious, both of his skill and of the reward that he reaped in being able to settle down in a nice house.

Yes, he had enemies, and they were foremost on his mind as he stepped through the woods. The sky was very dark from an early moonset and an overcast sky, something that he thought was beneficial from a rational point of view—after all, it meant less exposure—but still set his teeth on edge. He couldn't help but recall that rustling bush earlier in the day.

He came to a cold spring with a set of stepping stones for travelers to use for crossing. To his left was an area of heavy undergrowth which spanned across the creek. To his right was a relatively clear patch, the trail that he would continue to follow to the tower. It was harder to see under these conditions, but the canopy above him was comparatively thin at this point, providing a little light. Flynn stepped onto the first stone and quietly crossed the brook, observing the soft bubbling noise. When he reached the other side, he felt thirsty from hearing the sound of rushing water, so he stooped down and bent over the spring. He knew this spring; he had drunk from it before many times. The water was only a few inches deep, but it was cold and clean. Flynn cupped his hands in the water and brought them to his lips to quench his thirst.

At once a foul, very unwelcome iron taste filled his mouth. He gagged and spat, making sure to get rid of every bit of this. He had a horrible feeling he knew what he had just tasted, and when he got on his knees again and peered closely at the bubbling spring, his fear was confirmed. The water was fouled with blood. Just on the other side of the undergrowth, maybe fifteen feet away, something was bleeding out into the creek. And considering that the blood kept flowing across the mossy stones, it was something fairly large.

Flynn stood up and darted away from the stream. He was disgusted, but more to the point, he was afraid. Either this was a large animal that had just been killed by an even larger predator, or it was a human victim. It did not seem at all likely to him that a hunter would clean game over a stream or choose to hunt during a night with such poor visibility. As he dashed through the clearing, he heard rustling behind him.

There was no undergrowth in which he could hide himself, and while he might be able to get away from whatever this was, he did not want to be seen. He glanced quickly upward at the trees, and, choosing one that seemed to be easy to climb and had a healthy canopy of leaves in which he might conceal himself, he reached out for the first branch and began to climb frantically.

After years of living on the edge, he had become very good at climbing trees, and this was one skill he had not lost. He was about twenty feet up when the pursuer finally came into sight. Whatever it was, it had not been in any hurry. Flynn ducked against the trunk, hardly daring to breathe, and gingerly peeked around and down.

A figure cloaked and hooded in black lumbered forward, dragging something behind it. Flynn squinted to try to get a better look and nearly gasped in horror at what he saw, but had just enough sense of his precarious situation to muffle himself. It was a person, a woman well known among the Snuggly Duckling nighttime crowd as a prostitute. He recognized this woman even though he had never engaged her particular "services"—and even though she was stark white except for the gaping, bleeding wound in her neck, obviously dead.

The black-cloaked figure that Flynn was sure was the murderer stopped and seemed to relax. Then, to his utter disgust and loathing, she—for the hands of that figure were definitely those of another woman—bent over the neck wound and began to feast upon the blood. The hood slipped, revealing a head of very dark hair, though Flynn could not quite tell what shade it was in the poor light. The truly horrifying thing about the spectacle, however, was that the victim's flesh seemed to be illuminated by some ghastly white light coming from the woman's eyes. Flynn could not see those eyes—and he felt very strongly that he did not want to—but there was nothing else that the unholy light could have come from.

Unable to watch the vampirism any longer, he turned away and leaned against the trunk of the tree. He didn't dare close his eyes in case the woman had indeed noticed him and was just biding her time. He reached for the dagger in his belt and drew it out with nervous fingers, breathing heavily.

At last, however, the woman decided that her work was finished. She pulled her hood back over her head, stepped aside, and left the body in the clearing as she continued past Flynn's tree on the very path he had planned to take. He remained in the tree for a while longer, too scared to come down just yet, but when he at last emerged onto the ground, he darted back in the direction he had come. He could not make it to the tower now.

Flynn should have felt relieved when he at last burst through his own front door, but a sound caught his attention at once—a scraping sound followed by a heavy thud. It seemed to be coming from the medieval dining hall, a room that he never used. He stopped cold and turned around, heading toward the room, his heart beating furiously in his chest.

There was nothing there. No furniture amiss, and no unwelcome guests. Flynn took a deep breath, trying to relax. _I'm just on edge from what I saw out there,_ he told himself. This was probably just a squirrel or a bird outside the window. He took another deep breath and left the room, but not before he had closed the heavy doors, found the correct key on his keyring, and locked them tightly. He headed upstairs and felt relieved to see Pascal waiting for him on the night table. Kicking off his boots and tossing aside his vest, he threw back the covers of the bed and collapsed on the mattress.

"She's got to get away from that place, Pascal," Flynn said in the dark. "I can't help but think that all these creepy sightings are related. Tomorrow you and I are going to go to the inn again and get those ruffians out to that tower."

Pascal chirped halfheartedly in response. Flynn could not see the chameleon's expression in the dark, but if he could, he would have been met with a look of extreme skepticism.

* * *

Rapunzel did not want to make this trip, but she knew that nothing good would come of putting it off. Her bare feet pattered down the earthen corridor lightly and quickly. She was sure that her heart was beating louder than her footsteps.

She had just wanted to see him again, to look at him while he slept, but Eugene hadn't been there. His bed was empty, and when she questioned Pascal in frantic whispers about his whereabouts, she was able to work out that he had left the house and was currently in the woods, heading for the tower.

She had to hope that he would not encounter her—_associate—_or that woman's thuggish henchmen who did exactly as she told them. She did not know exactly what Madame was planning to do in the woods, and she hadn't wanted to know. These days, the less she knew about Madame's plans, the better she felt, but she did know that the intentions were not good. She had to hope that Eugene would avoid her. She had to hope that he would arrive while the tower remained empty and would turn back, rather than searching for the catacombs that she regrettably had told him existed underground.

She wondered how on earth they had come to be. Madame did not want to talk about it, though she acted as if she knew. Any system of tunnels and secret rooms as vast as this one had to be the work of centuries, but who had been here to have them built? She also wondered _why _there was a connection between Eugene's house and her tower. Her associate didn't want to talk about that either, and indeed, the subject of the manor house seemed to irritate her, for some reason. Being denied answers was certainly a very familiar situation for Rapunzel, and several months ago she would not have questioned it. But now, things were different.

* * *

The next morning, Flynn was eating breakfast moodily, dreading what he was sure was to come, when he heard a knock at the door. At once he leaped up, immediately thinking it might be Rapunzel. He dashed down the hallway and flung open the door at once, only to find himself face-to-face with an old nemesis: the Captain of the Corona Guard.

Confusion flooded his face at once—and disappointment. "Can I help you?" he snapped resentfully.

The Captain glared at him with deep dislike—and something else. Flynn had heard that when the city council, overwhelmed by new and violent crime, voted to withdraw all the old warrants for criminals who had not been active for years, the Captain had been against revoking his. But today, there was a suggestion of smugness in the man's visage.

"You've been summoned to the Port," the Captain said around a barely concealed smirk. "There's been a suspicious shipment marked for _your _address. I'm afraid you've got some questions to answer." He could hardly hide the glee in his words.

_What the hell?_ Flynn's thoughts blared through his mind. He hadn't ordered anything, let alone anything suspicious. But the Captain was not to be gainsaid in this. There were consequences to being a law-abiding citizen. Resentfully he grabbed his cloak and headed out the door.

The Guards escorted him into a cart—_like a common criminal,_ he thought angrily—and drove quickly toward the island city. He had to grant that they made much better time than he could have done on foot, but he still didn't like being treated this way.

At last, though, they arrived at the Port of Corona, the shipyard where goods were loaded and unloaded. Flynn glanced around. The first thing he noticed was that there was a smallish merchant ship that guards were poring over. The second was that a tall, bespectacled woman in gray stood aloof beside the guards: Rapunzel's associate, Madame Elaine—but not Rapunzel herself. Suddenly Flynn realized what must have happened, and fury boiled up in him at once, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until the Captain pompously came over once more to question them.

"All right," he said, taking a scroll in hand and unrolling it. "You, Eugene Fitzherbert"—he spoke the name around a contemptuous sneer; it was clear he didn't believe that was his real name—"and Elaine Corvinus, have been summoned here to account for the highly startling contents of a shipment of goods. The ship was being unloaded in secret in the dead of night, which as you know is in violation of tax and customs law in this state, but the captain has been fined for this. However, in apprehending the crew in the midst of this _unlawful _release of goods, we discovered that the _entirety _of the ship's cargo was destined for _your_ address"—the Captain leered at Flynn again—"in your name." He turned to the woman, who regarded the proceedings with a cool confidence.

Flynn's mind was churning. Elaine _Corvinus?_ Was that how she was passing herself off? Of course, it was incredibly unlikely that she was an actual descendant of the thirteenth-century witch, but the fact that she had chosen that name for herself spoke volumes to him, a man who had chosen his own _nom de guerre_ with care and purpose. She must see herself as carrying on the old woman's work.

The Captain continued, surprised that neither of them had anything to say. "The nature of the cargo was most shocking. In fact, we have closed the port to the citizenry while this hearing takes place, because it would not do for the public to know about what was on that ship." He glared pointedly at Flynn, who by this time was getting angry that the Captain had already decided _he _was the guilty party here, but again had no response. "The shipment contained exactly three dozen coffins dating from the medieval period," the Captain snarled, "from places as far-flung as England and Scotland. The purveyor was listed only as 'E. H.' in Transylvania." He rolled up the scroll, clenching it tightly in his fist. "These caskets are marked to contain the remains of the likes of Merlyn and Morgana le Fay! Now, I don't believe in superstition, but this is most inappropriate, Ri—_Fitz_herbert. Most inappropriate." He was puffy-faced and red when he finally stopped speaking.

Flynn did not wait for the woman beside him to speak. "Captain," he said, "It's obvious that you think I ordered this and put her name on it to try to pin it on someone else... but let me tell you this, I did _not._ I don't know why she used my address, but she did, and frankly I hope you do get an account out of her about what she's up to, because—"

"That's enough," the Captain said. He turned gruffly to the tall woman. "Madam, is this true?"

Flynn expected the woman to say no, but to his extreme surprise, she merely raised an eyebrow. "Of course," she said in natural tones. "I did order a shipment of human anatomical specimens, because I am conducting scientific research in my home, but I had no idea that my supplier would resort to grave-robbery... let alone the graves of esteemed personages. Of course the caskets must be sent back where they came from and re-interred. I am as shocked as either of you."

The Captain looked deflated. He had obviously expected to get Flynn over this, and this was not going the way he wanted it to at all. "So you did order these? But why have them addressed to Rider's house?" His words were grudging, and he had abandoned his attempt to use Flynn's proper name.

"Because my house is deep in the woods of Amwald, and it isn't easy to find. My fellow-researcher is a _friend _of this man and often visits the manor house"—Flynn opened his mouth in outrage at the lie, but she kept speaking—"and I was sure that, _if _all had been in order, it would have been easy enough to transport them to my residence."

The Captain looked sour. "What of the shipper?" he asked gruffly. "This E. H. person. Who is that?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," the woman said smoothly. "I can write down the name of the scientific supplier that I used, though." At once the Captain handed her a small pad of parchment, on which she began to scribble an address.

"Thank you," he said, taking the paper and stuffing it importantly into a pocket. "We'll certainly look into this, because in this time of scientific advancement, it just won't do for shady places like this to operate without reprisal." He tipped his hat. "Good day to you."

When he was gone, Flynn and the woman began walking silently away from the dock. They passed by a deserted warehouse, and Flynn seized this opportunity.

"All right," he snarled, "I want the truth and I want it now."

Elaine sneered at him. "You heard what I said to the Captain."

"And you were lying. We both know it. What are you doing out there? I know why you're using the name you are," he added darkly.

For a second, plain fear filled her face. Then her eyebrows narrowed in anger. "Oh, do you? I don't know who you think you are, but you have no right to demand anything of me."

"I have the right when you involve me in it! You gave my address!"

"I assure you, it won't happen again."

"You're damn right it won't. Look, to be honest with you, I don't care what you do. Grind up bones all you want, or whatever you planned to do out there. But _let her go._ I notice she isn't here. Where is she? If you have hurt her—" He trailed off threateningly. "I know you associate with thugs. I don't know who they are, but don't deny it. I can't _believe _you would put her at risk by having them around."

The woman sneered again. "What do you take me for? I keep my hired men under tight control. No one is in danger from them."

"I'm glad to hear it, but that's not the main point. You don't let Rapunzel leave that tower and stay with me, even though I know she wants to. You have no right to do that."

A nasty laugh escaped the woman. "You _know _she wants to? You're wrong. I spend much more time with her, and I can assure you, she does _not._ And who can blame her? Her reputation is destroyed. Everyone in Amwald, and probably many in Corona, know all about how you took advantage of her naïveté and seduced her innocence. She knows perfectly well she can't show her face in the village again without knowing that every single person who looks at her thinks of that. She knows that the whole village sees her as a dirty whore, a fallen woman. She has _chosen _to stay in the tower with me rather than face that or return to the person who did it to her—and you have no one to blame for that but yourself." When she at last stopped speaking, a mean-spirited, sadistic smile had spread across her face.

Flynn was seething with rage through this whole narrative, and when it ended, he turned to the woman with fury. "You're lying," he snarled. "You're lying, or else you poisoned her against me by telling her all this yourself. No one in Amwald, of all God-forsaken places, ever judged her! _You _told her that's how people looked at her in town—or else you're just lying."

"Believe what you want, Rider," the woman sneered. "I don't care." She sniffed contemptuously and turned away, leaving him standing behind the warehouse in a turmoil of his own emotions.


	10. A Raid and a Confession

**Chapter Ten: A Raid and a Confession**

* * *

He wandered in the city for hours, stopping in a tavern on the island for a stiff drink and a quiet place to think things over. There was _no _doubt in his mind that the recent sinister happenings were connected to this woman—none at all. The thugs, she had all but admitted to using—and since she had attempted to import a whole shipment of desecrated coffins, Flynn suddenly realized that the boat full of boxes that the Snuggly Duckling crowd had seen was probably another shipment of coffins. He didn't have any actual evidence that the vampiric act he had witnessed in the forest was related to this woman, but even during Amwald's most recent crime spree—the period when the former lord and lady of Corona were mourning—such things had not been reported. Flynn did not know, and did not want to guess, what the woman had intended to do with the eminent remains she had tried to import (or the remains that she _had _managed to acquire), but human remains plus possible vampirism plus the Necronomicon could not equal anything good. She also apparently regarded herself as a latter-day version of the old thirteenth-century witch Gothel Corvinus, down to assuming the witch's surname and becoming involved in the same kinds of incidents that, in that less skeptical time, had led to her being run out of the manor house. Whatever was going on at that tower or those tunnels Rapunzel said existed, it could not be good—and Rapunzel was trapped in it.

As Flynn drank up his liquor and ordered more, his mind turned to Rapunzel, and what that woman had said about her. Her parting words had stung a lot worse than he had wanted to admit. He thought back to numerous occasions when he had taken Rapunzel to bed and been demanding, overly physical, and generally inconsiderate of her. He had taken it for granted that she would continue to be flattered and pleased with his attentions and would not have anywhere else to go anyway. He had underestimated the strength of her bond to her mother, and in so doing, had failed to give her the kind of loving emotional support she had needed to cope with that loss. He had intended to keep her to himself permanently, but for some silly, unaccountable reason, had still been afraid to allow his feelings to flourish. The last time they'd had each other, he had all but admitted he cared for her, and at the _time _she had known it—but once she was with that woman all day long, it would have been easy for her to feed doubts in Rapunzel's mind. Flynn still wasn't convinced that "Elaine" had been telling the truth about Rapunzel's desire to stay in the tower, but if she _had, _it was all too plausible that Rapunzel really had been swayed. That thought was incredibly depressing to him.

He spent much of the afternoon in that Corona pub, eating lunch and supper there. When he finally, somehow, managed to return to his house, it was nighttime. He locked himself in and collapsed drunkenly on his bed, barely minding the fact that Pascal, in an attempt to punish him for not feeding him, had apparently raided the breakfast room and brought grape pits upstairs, which he had tossed all over the bedroom floor.

* * *

Flynn slept till noon the next day. As soon as he had suppressed his hangover headache enough to go outside, he stumbled his way toward the Snuggly Duckling. He was going to present everything he had learned—and the shipment of coffins was a far more damning piece of evidence than any he'd yet had—and try to organize a party to march out to the tower.

As had been the case the last time he was in there, the pub was full of the usual daytime patrons, though it seemed that several of the regulars were missing. Something was off. Flynn scanned the tables, trying to determine who was not there. Yes, Shorty was definitely missing. So were Big Nose and Hookhand—and Flynn realized that it was the lack of piano music that he had missed.

He had just gotten the attention of Vladamir and Gunther when Hookhand himself stormed into the pub. The floor creaked with every stamp of his heavy feet. He stormed up to the bar, bypassing the piano bench, and sat down next to Flynn.

"We've got a problem," he growled.

The entire common room seemed to snap to attention. Even Flynn glanced over.

"I guess we all know what happened last night with Shorty," he began.

Flynn interrupted. "I don't. What happened to him?" He had no particular affection for the crazy old man, but considering how many things had "happened" lately, and what _kind,_ he felt dread wash over him at what he was about to hear.

Hookhand turned to Flynn. "I guess he got lost in the woods, but when we found him this morning, he was almost dead. Something had feasted on his shoulder, something that left human-lookin' teeth marks. Big Nose took him in. He's always had a strange kind of admiration for the old geezer. We're all hoping he'll pull through, but I don't know."

Flynn grimaced. At once his mind turned to his memory of the vampire woman in the woods. There was no question that it was the same person, he decided. He made a mental note to tell this to them after Hookhand had related whatever else he had to say.

"Anyhow," Hookhand continued, "now that we _do _all know what happened to Shorty, I'll carry on. I was going into the woods after it happened to try to find the villain, and I came upon _them_ in the woods, close-up. The twins. It is definitely them. I know it don't make sense," he added, "but I swear to you, they look just like them." His face was unnaturally pale, as one might expect if he had just seen dead men.

"But that can't be," one of the thugs immediately protested. "Maybe they had more brothers."

Hookhand slammed his hook into the bar and ripped up a chunk of wood. "Look," he growled, "I know what I saw. Something _ain't_ right in this village, and ignoring it won't solve anything."

Flynn decided that now was the time to speak up. He had a great deal to say, and he hoped that his residual hangover would not prevent him from being coherent. "Gentlemen," he began. "Hookhand's right."

All eyes were now on him, and he began to speak, telling them about the summons he had received just yesterday to the dock, the cargo of coffins containing the remains of renowned wizards, and the involvement of Rapunzel's sinister new colleague. He mentioned his theory about the boxes in the boat that the ruffians had seen from the footbridge. He made sure not to implicate Rapunzel herself in the scandal, since he was sure that she had become trapped in the older woman's schemes, but he did mention the ill-reputed book that the woman had in her possession. Not everyone in the pub knew of the book, but those who did shuddered in dread at its mention. Then he turned to his encounter in the woods with the vampiric creature.

"So Shorty wasn't the only victim," he finished, observing with satisfaction that everyone in the common room looked properly horrified and outraged at what was apparently being perpetrated in their midst. "And gentlemen, I have good reason to think that Rapunzel is being held hostage by this—witch—and is possibly being forced to work for her against her will. I don't think any of these outrages should be allowed to stand."

"Damn straight," said Killer.

"I agree," said Bruiser.

Several other ruffians cracked their knuckles and clenched their fists.

Seizing the moment, Flynn suddenly leaped on the nearest table, standing up and facing the entire pub. He wasn't sure what made him do it, especially since his head still throbbed vaguely, but perhaps it was that after days and days of being thwarted, he had simply had enough. "So—I think we can all agree that we _don't need _another witch panic to start up, not after what happened in recent decades with innocent people being wrongly accused," he said. There were grunts and nods of agreement, and he continued. "But I think we can also agree that it's high time we got some answers about what's going on at that tower. Am I right?"

Even though no one except Flynn had given any particular thought to what was going on at the tower, or even known of its existence, the entire crowd roared a resounding, _"Yeah!"_

"So what we need to do," he said, "is to go out there—all of us together—and have this woman explain herself. Maybe she has nothing to do with these thugs we've all been seeing and the vampirism, but she does work with _some _thugs, and she ordered a bunch of dead bodies from a highly suspicious source. If she's working on real scientific research, let's see it! And make her release the young lady she's holding captive. What do you say?"

"I say we should do it right now," Vladamir growled, standing up.

"_Yeah!"_ the rest of the crowd roared again. Ruffians began to get to their feet, grabbing weapons and cracking their knuckles in preparation. Flynn jumped off the table, scrambled toward the head of the group, and led the pack of ruffians out of the pub and into the woods.

Before long they found the tower. Several of the ruffians expressed shock that such a thing had been there without their knowledge, but most of them simply looked angry and determined. Flynn, still feeling the thrill of leadership, strode forward into the clearing.

"Rapunzel, are you in there?" he bellowed out.

Silence.

"Madame! Are you in there?"

More silence. Flynn felt uneasy, knowing that a pack of ruffians was back of him, and _he _had taken leadership of them and led them out here. He really hoped they didn't turn on him if this didn't go right.

He needn't have worried. "If you don't come out, we're coming in ourselves!" Hookhand bellowed, stomping toward the tower. "You got till the count of three. ONE!" He paused. "TWO!" A longer pause. "THREE!" He stormed into the ground-level stone entrance and began crashing up the stone stairs. The whole pack of ruffians followed behind him, crowding at the door. Flynn stepped away. _He _wanted to lift up that stone and get into the underground tunnels, where he was sure they were hiding, but that wasn't possible with the entire Snuggly Duckling clientele barreling up the steps.

There was a loud thud, then—_"Ow!"_ Hookhand's voice suddenly echoed down the steps. "Damn it, she's blocked the entrance! _Heave!"_ Flynn heard several ruffians pushing away at the stone that, when removed, opened the first floor of the tower to the stairs. However, it didn't seem to be budging. Curses and grunts of pain increased from the crowd inside the tower entrance. At last they shuffled out, looking defeated and dejected.

"I don't get it," Hookhand said, still rubbing his head with his real hand. "How could they even get in and out of there if the only door is blocked?"

Flynn didn't want to suggest what had immediately come to his mind—namely, that the woman had found something in her old magic books to seal the entrance against them. "They must be in there and have a bigger stone blocking the entrance," he said feebly.

Hookhand didn't look convinced. "There were a bunch of us pushing on it together," he said. "Me and Vladamir and Killer. I don't think it's that."

Flynn frowned. "Well," he said, "I have reason to believe there is an underground room around here somewhere where she might be hiding—and I think I know how to get into it." He strode toward the tower. The group of ruffians backed away as he approached. He knelt on the ground in front of the stone entrance and placed his hands around the sides of the engraved central stone. With a firm grip on it, he lifted up the stone—

–And found himself staring at hard-packed dirt.

Confusion flooded his mind. "But," he stammered, holding the stone upright on its edge, "but this can't be right."

Hookhand seemed to understand the situation. "C'mon," he said gruffly, grabbing Flynn by the back of his collar and yanking him away. The stone crashed back in place as he was pulled away. "If she can... you know... then there ain't much we can do about it. But there _is _something else we can look up."

"Oh, what?" Uneasy on his feet, Flynn stared out at the group of ruffians, all his former bravado and confidence gone.

"We can see if the Stabbingtons' graves are empty," Hookhand said grimly. "C'mon everyone, we're wasting time here." The ruffians seemed to silently agree with him, and in a moment, the whole group began to trudge back into the forest in the general direction of the island city.

It was a mostly quiet trip that they made. Everyone seemed to have been frightened into silence by the fiasco with the unmovable stone blocking the entrance, and nobody questioned Flynn's conviction that there should have been a cavity beneath the engraved paving stone. They might be simple, unlettered ruffians, but they had a fearful respect of "dark magic" rather like the measured reaction, calculated to avoid rabble-rousing, that more sophisticated people would have.

However, the worst that any of _them _could fear was a possible threat to their own lives, something that they, being large and muscular, felt that they could handle if it ever happened—a bit of cognitive dissonance considering their fear of dark magic, but perhaps something best seen as a survival technique. It would not do, after all, to give up any hope of surviving a hostile encounter before it even happened—so however it might be, the ruffians all pretty much believed that they were in control of their _own _fates, and the concern they had was for the safety of the village as a whole. They had no personal stake in this. _They _didn't have to contemplate the idea of somebody they cared for being held hostage underground where nobody else could get to her.

* * *

The Captain was taken aback by the demand of the ruffian mob, led by this time by Hookhand (Flynn figured that looking at the graves _had _been Hookhand's idea, after all, and he also knew that the Captain would not be very amenable to granting the request of a mob led by _him)_. He sputtered and bristled that it was _not _common practice to disturb even the grave of murderers who had been executed, and what possible reason could the ruffians have for wanting him to do so?

"We think the grave has been robbed," Hookhand snarled back to the Captain. "We think somebody's already gone in and disturbed it."

The Captain turned pale at this. "Very well then," he said nervously, nodding his head rotely, all resistance to the idea gone. Flynn suspected that the man was still shaken from the startling seizure of coffins at the dock, and he, hidden in the crowd of over-large thugs, managed a smug smile at that idea.

The Captain dispatched several soldiers to the grave of the Stabbington brothers with shovels. They began digging. Flynn noticed at once that the soil did indeed seem unnaturally loose, and as alarmed frowns formed on the soldiers' faces, he realized that the same thing had occurred to them.

At last they reached the level at which the bodies should have been, but it was plain as day that the grave was stark empty. The Captain began blustering and raving that they would get to the bottom of the outrage and redouble protection on all the cemeteries in the kingdom, but by this time, the ruffians were not even surprised—and neither was Flynn. All of his prior skepticism about the identities of the redheaded thugs seemed to have vanished. _How _it could be, he could not imagine—though he implicated the Necronomicon in all of it. But had that _woman _had access to the book by the time the twins were being spotted? Flynn could not recall whether the "twins" were being seen before Rapunzel took the book out of his house or after. He needed to go back home, he realized, and work out the timeline of everything in his memories.

They were back in Amwald by twilight. The ruffians headed into the pub while Flynn headed back to his house. Shortly after a very quick meal of leftovers—Attila had been in the mob and had not prepared any food for his employer today—he heard a knock at the front door.

Leaping up from the table, he dashed down the hallway with a pounding heart and flung open the door. At once a tiny, warm, yet trembling form rushed headlong into his arms.

"_Rapunzel?"_

She was squeezing him so tightly that he could hardly breathe, but there she was, alive, warm, breathing, and in his embrace, and he was so grateful for it that he almost forgot to lock the front door behind them as he helped her down the hallway. Fortunately, she was more aware of such things than he was and reminded him, frantically, to do so.

At this point he finally released her—and noticed for the first time the harassed, hunted look that was written on her face. As soon as the lock clicked, she spoke again.

"Do you have a key for the doors to the banquet hall?"

The question was asked so frantically, so fearfully, that he felt a chill creep down his spine in spite of everything. "Yes," he said slowly. "Why do those doors need to be locked?"

She bit her lip, unsure for a moment, but then it burst out. "There's an entrance to this house—a secret underground passage—through that room."

At once he thought about the underground rooms they had tried to find that afternoon at the tower. Surely this couldn't be part of the same system. That tower was an hour and a half's walk from here, a good four or five miles into the forest. How could something that vast have been built?

He had to know. "Does it connect with—with your book room?"

She looked at him, eyes wide, and nodded.

He sucked in his breath. It was unbelievable—but it was true. And now that she had confirmed it, he understood the necessity of locking up at once. He did _not _want that companion of hers—the companion from whom she was clearly running—getting into his house. He kept the keyring in his hand and went with her down the hallway to the tall doors to the dining hall, where he stuck the correct key and locked the doors.

"Where does it come out?"

"A panel of wall," she said shakingly. "What you thought was a former fireplace. It's actually an entrance."

Of course, he realized. It couldn't be anything else. There was no _space _unaccounted for except that. "And at the tower?" he asked.

"She's sealed that end off," Rapunzel mumbled.

"Then how did you get out?" Flynn asked.

She threw herself in his arms again, letting out a sob. He held her, trying to give her the comfort she sought, suddenly regretting the question, because whatever it was, it must have been painful.

"She's gone out of the country right now," she murmured into his chest. "She went to Transylvania to see—that man I wrote to once, the one who shipped her all the..." She trailed off in a shudder, but he did not need her to finish. He knew whom she meant.

"And you?" he asked as gently as he could, stroking her hair.

"She locked me inside the tower," Rapunzel whispered. "I was there—I heard you, all of you, but I couldn't answer, because she had me chained up and gagged."

Blatant outrage filled Flynn at this thought. "What?" he sputtered. "She left you like that while gallivanting off? How were you supposed to eat and drink?"

With this question, she seemed to break apart before his eyes. This whole time, she had been careful with her words—not as a person trying to be shifty with him, trying to keep secrets from him, but as someone who was _too afraid _to tell the full truth. No longer. A veritable volcano of words and confessions began to erupt as he helped her upstairs.

"She left a couple of the 'guards' _in shape_ and _they _were going to feed me," she gasped. "They were going to untie the gag and give me food and water and watch me consume it, and then tie it back, and Eugene, they're _horrible, _they're all simply horrible, and then once she gets back, she's going to have all those coffins and more—and then they're going to... _Eugene,_ I'm _so_ sorry—I didn't mean for any of this to happen! I promise I didn't." A tear trickled down her cheek.

He did not understand much of what she had just said, but it left a vague horror and dread in him as she said it. They were outside the bedroom now, and he turned the knob and brought her into the room, helping her to the couch. They sat down side by side, with Pascal sitting on the armrest nearest him and watching sympathetically as a silent witness. She buried herself against him once again, and he wrapped his arms around her. It would come out, he knew. The truth would come out now. It was natural that it would be disjointed when she was this terrified.

"I know you didn't," he said soothingly, stroking her hair on the back of her head. "I know it got out of your control."

"You were right," she said in a cracked voice. "You were right about—_her."_

Of course he was, he thought, but he had not the slightest inclination to gloat about that. "It doesn't matter," he said. "I understand why you were drawn to her. You missed your mother so much that you clung to anything and anyone associated with her."

She drew away and gazed at him, a pained look filling her face. She seemed to want to tell him something—but then the moment passed. She took a deep, shuddering breath. "I need... to start with that, I guess," she said in a calmer, more ordered voice.

"Take your time," he said gently. He planted a kiss on top of her head.

She drew another shuddering breath before beginning. "It starts with my hair," she said.

"Your hair?"

"My hair. It used to—to have a power," she said uneasily, glancing at him as if she feared he would not believe her. But by this time, hair with a (presumably magic) power sounded almost pedestrian to him, so he said nothing. She continued, "It used to be long, _really, really long, _and blonde, and there was this spell my—mother—and I said that caused it to glow and heal anything it was touching. It could heal wounds, diseases, take away age..."

That catalog of properties triggered a memory of something, some story he'd heard or read, deep in his brain somewhere, but he could not think of what it was or when he had heard of it, so he dismissed it for now. "Wow," he said. "What did she do to your hair to get it like that?"

"She said I was born with it," Rapunzel said. "She said she didn't cause it. I don't know. But that's why she never let me leave. She told me people would want to use it for themselves. And one day, we just... we fought. It was bad. And I got mad and told her I'd just cut it off if the hair was what was keeping me indoors. So I did..." She shook in his arms. He held her tighter, which seemed to comfort her, and she continued. "And when I did, it all turned brown, like it is now, and then she just... turned to dust before me. She died, just like that, and turned into dust immediately."

Another one of those chills shot down Flynn's spine. "That's _weird,"_ he said. "Death... that is not normal... it's not what is supposed to happen."

"I know... I realize it now," she said shakily. "But at the time... well..."

He hugged her again. "I understand now, though," he said. "You felt guilty about it." She nodded. "And that's why you got so drawn to that experiment, and those researchers she had known," he added. "But sweetheart"—the word slipped out before he realized it, but for once, it didn't cross his mind to take it back or be ugly to her to compensate for this moment of affection—"it was her fault. I don't know how she did it, or why, but she must have somehow tied her life to your hair."

She glanced up at him. There was still something lurking just behind her eyes, he sensed, but she couldn't bring herself to say whatever it was just yet. "I'm not sure," she mumbled. "I've... questioned a lot of things since all this happened."

"Naturally," he said. "But go ahead. You can tell me everything. I want to help you... to keep you safe from this 'Elaine' woman." He squeezed her once more.

She gazed at him, her eyes wide again with fear. He felt her heartbeat quicken. "I don't know if you can," she whispered. "I don't know if anyone can. She's... _bad, _Eugene. You don't know _how_ bad."

"I have an idea," he said darkly.

"I didn't mean it to happen," she cried again. "I swear I didn't. I didn't know that she wanted to do... this. _Eugene."_

"Of course you didn't," he agreed soothingly, though he had no idea what the woman did intend to do. Whatever it was, it must truly be bad, so bad that Rapunzel was finding it difficult to talk about it. "What is it that she's trying to do, love?"

"She's going to... _Eugene,"_ she gasped, as if something had suddenly occurred to her, "Eugene, we have to get out of here! When she comes back, she's going to know—she already knows I don't want to be there; that's why she chained me up, because she knew I would try to run away—I _did _run away—Eugene, she's threatened your life! She'll kill you if she finds out I've told you this!"

If she had expected that to shock and horrify him, she would have been mistaken. By this point, he assumed nothing less. "That doesn't surprise me," he said calmly. "But Rapunzel, I'm prepared. I've got the Duckling crowd to back me up, remember." He paused. "What about _your _life? That's what I've been worried about all this time. I know she keeps thugs around. Do they—have they harmed you? Does she threaten you with them?"

Rapunzel trembled in his arms. "Not directly," she got out. "They're... enslaved to her. They don't do anything except what she tells them to do, and they've never touched me... but knowing that all she has to do is utter a word..." She shuddered. "They're not in shape right now, though."

There it was again, that phrase "in shape." Rapunzel had said it when she talked about the "guards," whoever _they _were, that the woman had left to unbind her and feed her. Eugene did not know what she meant by it, but he had a feeling that it did not mean physical fitness in this context. "Rapunzel, what—no, never mind," he said. He didn't need to interrogate her about the terminology of black magic. It didn't matter right now. What mattered, he thought with sudden clarity, was that she had escaped her evil colleague of her own accord, and had returned to him. She had not turned against him at all. She was safe in his arms, the very thing he had wanted for days, and the associate was en route to a foreign land. They would deal with it tomorrow. For now, he wanted to show her just how much she meant to him—finally.

She seemed to grasp the change in his tone and his intentions. A look of hope flashed in her eyes as he leaned in, wrapping an arm around her, pulling her close for a kiss. "I've missed this," she whispered just before their lips met.

He plunged into the kiss, devouring her and losing himself in her simultaneously. His fingers threaded through her soft hair and his grip on her waist tightened. His eyes were closed, but that only heightened the sensation of touch, and he felt the soft, smooth touch of her hands against his face, her thin ladylike fingers stroking his skin.

They broke apart for a moment. _"You've_ missed this?" he said. "How do you think I've felt?"

"Probably the same," she whispered as they fell into another kiss every bit as deep. The hand around her waist slipped down lower. He gathered her in his arms and lifted her off the couch. Vaguely he heard a _cheep_ of embarrassment and a scattering of tiny footsteps as Pascal scampered off the armrest and hid under the couch.

She clung to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and planting kisses on his face as he carried her to bed and set her gently down on the mattress. He climbed on it himself, kicking off his boots and throwing aside his doublet and shirt. She quickly untied the laces on her own boots and let them fall to the floor. He lifted her off the mattress and leaned in to kiss her while he unbuttoned the back of her dress. Once she was divested of her clothing and he of his, she opened her arms—no, from her body language, he realized she was opening her whole self to him. Seeing her like that, pleading with her gaze, giving herself with her open, inviting manner, was suddenly the biggest turn-on he could think of. She wanted him, she needed him—and he needed her. He didn't mind admitting that to himself now.

For the first time, he truly made love to her. It was so different from how the rest of his encounters with her had been, and so much better. She looked absolutely beautiful as her chest heaved and her face grew pink with heat and blood flow and anticipation. _"Eugene,"_ she cried at last, barely getting the name out as she came undone.

He did not last much longer himself. This was _unbelievable—_he thought he knew all there was to know about sex, but he'd never felt anything like this before. But he had to tell her. He had shown her, but there had to be no doubt in her mind. He should have said it long ago, if he'd been man enough to admit it to himself first... but he hadn't, and he had suffered for it in the form of not knowing whether she would ever come back to him. Still, his sufferings had to be nothing compared to hers. He had to tell her.

"Rapunzel I love you," he gasped out as he spent himself in her.

She whimpered in his arms, clinging to him as they collapsed bonelessly on the mattress. For a minute they could do nothing but offer tender, gentle touches to each other. When at last they were masters of their words again, she spoke.

"You meant it?" she whispered against the side of his face, close to his ear.

"Yes, I meant it," he said. "I've been an idiot... I don't deserve to have you... but somehow I do—"

"You do," she breathed in agreement.

"—and yes. I meant it. I love you, and I hope you never doubt it now."

She snuggled against him. "I love you too... and I never really doubted it in the first place," she whispered.

He brought her as close as he could, relishing the feeling of her chest rising and falling so close to his, and planted a kiss on her forehead. They soon fell asleep in each other's arms.


	11. A Reversal and a Cry

**WARNING****: **Character deaths.

Needless to say, I am not going to achieve my goal of finishing this story by Halloween, since that's, well, today. After this chapter, there are three more. I expect they will be about the length of this one.

* * *

**Chapter Eleven: A Reversal and a Cry**

* * *

Eugene awoke the next day to an unwelcome sensation that he had not felt in quite some time: the sensation of wet chameleon tongue in his ear.

"Gah!" he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright as Pascal fell to the pillow, his objective achieved. He blinked himself awake and glanced over to the other pillow, where Rapunzel should have been resting.

It was empty.

Immediately a bad feeling came over Eugene. Why would the pillow have been empty? He could not think of any good reason for it, but a number of very bad ones. His heartbeat increasing rapidly, he then noticed the sheet of paper on the night table next to Rapunzel's side of the bed. Even from where he sat, he could tell it was filled with her handwriting, a page much longer than the brief notes she had left him when she intended to spend a day at the tower. His heart now pounding in dread, he reached over and picked the sheet up.

_Dearest Eugene:—_

_I apologize for not making a full disclosure last night regarding the wretched business in the old "laboratory" and at the tower, a request that you have often made, even after I moved the "project" out of your home. When I did move it out of that room in your house, it was—at least in part—out of the conviction that you did not care for me from your heart, and that you would not truly miss me. There were other factors behind this decision—some of which I hope to explain in this letter—but that was an important one, and I know now that it was a terrible error. The fact that you continued to show such concern for my well-being even after I left your house is a proof of love that I will cherish for whatever time remains to me, and would do so even if you hadn't made your confession last night. But now it is my turn to confess—for a confession is what it is._

_I have no grand discovery to announce to the world. The old laboratory research was indeed successful—too successful—but it is a monstrous success and it must be put away, or at least kept at bay. I thought I was acting on the instinct of love and of righting a wrong that I committed in the heat of anger. I am too afraid to say explicitly what I have done—believe me, Eugene, the less you know of this, the safer you are—but I hope you can understand and deduce it yourself. You must have an idea of what was once in that urn that I brought to your house. I have not tried to stir up evil, but I have nevertheless unleashed something that is beyond my ability to control—and I cannot, at least, repay your love by setting it upon you. I should not have returned to the house last night; I should have continued on my way far away, where at least if it pursued me, it would pursue only me, and I could keep it distracted from its true goals with pursuit of me. But again, it would seem that acting on love led me astray._

_I am not going back to that tower. I will never return to that tower alive. If you ever hear that I am there, do not believe it. "Madame Elaine"—and I suspect you know this is not her true name—is behind everything that has been happening lately. She is likely not en route to Transylvania any longer; the creatures that I escaped from have probably waylaid her and informed her of my escape, and if this is true, then she will be after me and I fear you too. I am going away to (I hope) learn some means of thrusting her back into the shadow-world from which I called her. That is what I am hoping desperately to do. Eugene—she intends to unleash beings, or entities, into the world that I cannot even describe to you—entities that she encountered in the place I brought her out of, and whatever happens, she must not be allowed to succeed in this. I am going to seek out whatever knowledge I can find. I beg you to protect yourself. She may seek you out, though I think she will focus on me, since I am the one who knows too much. But if you happen to see her, kill her on sight and destroy the body. Please do not bring out another raiding party. She has powerful allies whose aid she would invoke if she felt threatened by numbers, but they are costly, so I do not think she would resort to using them for a single confrontation._

_I do not know if I will see you again... but know that you have—_

_My love always,_

_Rapunzel._

Eugene set down this note and got up to get himself dressed. Every action he took seemed to be driven by a sort of automatism, because his mind was too engrossed with the letter to think of anything else. The pounding of his heart seemed so loud that it might well be echoing through the house. The letter seemed mad—stark mad—and yet at the same time, all too sane. Through the disjoint, frantic sentences lurked a very real, very connected terror. He didn't quite have the presence of mind to work out what she was talking about with respect to the urn, the old experiment, and the act of anger that she had sought to set right, but the parts about her current colleague definitely rang true and her fears made sense. He had had the same sinister impressions of "Elaine," or whatever her true name was (and he wondered why Rapunzel had not given it), ever since he laid eyes on her, with her black hair and tinted glasses. What sort of eyes did those glasses hide, he wondered? There was no saying, given what kind of forces the woman clearly dealt with. He had enough knowledge of the Necronomicon to have dark suspicions about just what sort of "allies" and "entities" she might be able to call forth, and what their potential power might be. Hadn't Rapunzel described her tower guards as "creatures"? That in itself was proof, in Eugene's opinion, that the woman was trafficking with evil things.

The thought of Rapunzel facing this woman and her "allies" alone made his stomach turn over. Whatever fears had compelled her to leave, whatever concern for _his _safety had driven her to part with him while he slept, she was making a terrible mistake, he was sure. Didn't she understand that he didn't _want _to continue without her? Didn't she know that he didn't want her to put herself in harm's way to keep him safe?

No, he would track her down and they would tackle this together. She couldn't have gotten far. She said she wasn't going back to the tower, so she was probably going through the village. It was a start, at least.

Pascal emerged again as Eugene finished pulling on his boots and leapt onto his shoulder. He seemed to understand what was going on. "Hey, little fellow," Eugene said affectionately to the lizard. "We're getting out of here. I don't feel safe in this house right now."

He left the house at once, not even waiting to eat breakfast. He could get food on the way. The first place he stopped was the Duckling.

"Guys," he said as he walked boldly inside. The ruffians looked up. "Has she been by today?"

A few of them exchanged unhappy glances. Finally Fang spoke. "She was here really early, right around dawn, and asked for somebody to draw her a map to Vienna."

"_Vienna?"_ Eugene exclaimed. "She thinks she's going to walk there? Does she have any idea—"

"No, I'm sure she was going to catch a carriage," Fang said, "but she set off on foot immediately. You going after her?"

–For Eugene had turned around at once and was heading back towards the entrance. "Yep," he said as he passed through.

There was only one road that Rapunzel could have taken, unless she chose to go through the woods—and Eugene was betting that she wouldn't do that. The road that she had to have taken cut through the village and continued past the border of the outer territories of Corona.

It was a very long walk, a good twenty miles to the border, and Eugene could not make it on an empty stomach. He hated to stop, because he knew that she had a head start on him, but he had no choice, and he was _not _going to eat breakfast at the Snuggly Duckling. He stopped at a bakery on the edge of the village and bought a small loaf of bread with cheese baked into the top. He brought a leather water bottle out of his satchel and filled it with cold spring water—fresh and unbloodied this time, he made sure, and from a different source than the one that had been befouled. With this sustenance in hand, he continued on his walk.

It was later in the afternoon when he arrived at the far border of Corona. The days were getting shorter now; the air was crisp, and he knew he would have to stop and spend the night somewhere out here if he wanted any chance of finding her. He wondered how detailed Rapunzel's map was. _He_ knew that there was nothing out here except the house where the former royal family lived, and, several miles from that, a lonely woodside tavern called the Diamond and Dagger, but did her map show that? The nearest tavern other than this one was a good ten miles away... but depending on what kind of head start Rapunzel had had, she might have attempted to make it there. As the sunlight faded, Eugene gazed up at the inn, with its diamond-paned casement windows. He had to at least see if she had stopped here. Sighing, he walked inside.

This tavern was a notch above the Snuggly Duckling in its clientele, being a more normal place with palatable food, but it was still rumored to have its own network of tunnels for liquor smuggling, and criminals did sometimes stay here. Rapunzel didn't need to be here, in any case. Eugene walked up to the innkeeper and leaned over the counter. He didn't want anyone else in the place to hear what he had to ask.

"What d'you want?" the innkeeper, a man named Mr. Arkham, asked gruffly.

"I was wondering if you had rented a room to a young woman, several inches shorter than me, with short, kind of choppy brown hair, very pretty looking. She would be wearing a dark traveling cloak," Eugene said in a low voice.

The innkeeper sneered. "What right do you have to know who's staying here? I don't give out room numbers, pal. There's too much crime around here already. I protect my guests."

Eugene sneered back. "She's my wife," he lied.

Arkham glanced quickly at Eugene's left hand before chortling. "You haven't got a wife, Rider. Yes, I know who you are—and you might as well forget whatever scheme you've got in mind, because I'm not telling you anything."

Eugene glared at the man. "I haven't got a 'scheme,' but fine. Give me a beer, why don't you? And I'm staying for dinner, so I'll want a plate of whatever your old lady's cooking tonight." _Rapunzel will come down for dinner if she's here,_ he thought to himself, _and if she's not, well, I need to eat anyway before continuing. I'll just keep going through the night till I get to the other tavern._

Arkham grunted in reply before heading to the taps to pour Eugene a stein of beer from one of the barrels. Eugene counted out the correct amount of money and sat down at the bar to wait. Arkham shoved the foaming beverage across the bar at him. Eugene sipped it. Yes, this was much better than the sludge they served at the Duckling. He kept to himself as he drank the beer, observing the door out the corner of his eye from time to time. Almost unconsciously he slipped into a shadowy part of the tavern common room and pulled his hood so it shadowed his face. If "Elaine" burst through the door, he did not want to be immediately identifiable to her.

The sun dipped low in the sky, and guests began to pile into the tavern. Arkham became busy enough that he paid no attention to Eugene anymore. Eugene slipped further into the shadows, though he supposed that being in a crowd was actually to his advantage if that woman made an appearance. Rapunzel had warned him against bringing out another raiding party to the tower, but "Elaine" surely wouldn't dare use any sort of witchcraft in such a public setting against people who _didn't _have ill intentions toward her—who, indeed, didn't even know of her existence.

All of a sudden, a bustling, very loud group of about half a dozen people burst into the inn. They looked afraid and excited and were chattering a mile a minute. Eugene could hardly make out what they were saying, but before long they were seated at a large table near the bar and he was able to hear their conversation, though they were still interrupting each other.

"_I _heard that whoever did it ripped their hearts right out."

"That ain't true and I have it on good authority—my brother knows the butler there—but there _was_ a hell of a lot of blood."

"The servants were in hysterics—"

"Seems they did it with a knife, so of course there'd be a lot of blood—"

"But rumors I heard were that there were teeth marks. _Human _teeth marks."

"That _is _true—"

"Their horse ran clean off into the woods. Fine white horse, bred for the guard, but wanted to stay with _them._ They couldn't get it to do anything else. But then once they were dead, it just disappeared."

"Whoever finds the animal is gonna make a ton of money off it."

"But wouldn't it go to the State? I mean, they ain't got a daughter anymore or anyone else to inherit it."

"You are ignorant. I am an attorney and I assure you, that horse is going to be held in trust for that girl, even though she's bound to be long dead. It'll be runnin' wild in the woods and no one can do a thing about it."

"That is a damn shame. Fine animal."

"Wonder why the horse didn't try to defend them? From all I heard about it, it was a kind of a vicious creature."

"But it took right off. Must've been awful to witness if that horse was scared of whoever did it."

"Do you think they'll ever find them?"

"Depends on what the servants can give as evidence. I don't know if anyone saw it."

"My brother who knows the butler said it was a _woman_ who did it."

"That cannot be right."

"He said it."

"It's true."

"Well, I'll be damned."

Finally someone from outside the new group spoke up. "What are you folks talking about?" the patron asked loudly. "What happened?"

Eugene's heart was thumping again, as it had been throughout every snatch of conversation that he had managed to catch. He had a terrible feeling he knew what had happened—though _why_ it would have happened, he could not explain.

"The Von Koronas and most of their servants are dead," announced the man who claimed to be a lawyer. Gasps of horror and shock filled the tavern for a minute, and the man paused and waited before continuing. "Apparently it happened a couple hours ago today. Nobody knows who did it or why, because nothing appeared to have been stolen out of the mansion. The couple of folks who survived said it was some woman they've never seen before, and that she was carrying a dagger and just went in and knifed them all in cold blood and then left. Totally dispassionately. They've never heard of anything like it before."

Eugene's worst fears were all but confirmed. For some unfathomable reason, that _witch _whom Rapunzel was running from—and he was _sure _it was she—had decided to murder the former royal family, a family that had already suffered so much. Rather than using black magic or summoning evil beings, she had done it mundanely with a simple dagger—and suddenly the memory of a dagger in a drawer in that tower came back to Eugene's mind. He had experienced a chill down his body at the sight of it. It was probably the same weapon.

But _why?_ Why would the woman want to kill this family?

"Where did they say she went?" a patron asked, jerking Eugene's thoughts back to the present.

"They didn't hang around and find out," the lawyer said. "She could be anywhere," he added ominously, clearly enjoying being in the spotlight with his grim tale.

The place immediately began to bustle with nervous, horrified-excited gossip about the slaughter, but Eugene did not take part in it. He felt the chameleon that was hiding under his hood dig its scaly claws into his shoulder in fear, and he slipped even further into the shadows. When Mr. and Mrs. Arkham brought out dinner to their guests—a huge roasted deer and assorted vegetables—Eugene took his venison steak and vegetables and slunk away from the rest of the crowd. He needed some time to think about this himself.

He could not recall Rapunzel ever saying exactly where "Elaine" had come from. With her name—though Rapunzel had confirmed his guess that it was a false name—and her supposed address of "Madame," he knew she was passing herself off to some as French, but her accent wasn't French in the slightest. He did not believe her true surname was the Hungarian surname she was giving out, either. That line had died out centuries ago. She actually did not seem to speak any differently from anyone else in the area—but even if she _were _a local, that could not explain the murder. The lord and lady of Corona had been kind, understanding people who had maintained good relations with the merchant guilds, had kept Corona open to all sorts of trade, had encouraged the free practice of any religion—Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism—that existed in the area, and had promoted modern enlightened thinking when they had ruled. Even when they were so subsumed in their own grief that they let crime flourish—grief, Eugene felt with a prick of guilt, that _he _had inflicted upon them with the theft of the princess's crown—the other powers in the area had _regretted _asking them to step down.

Perhaps someone who had been a victim of that crime might resent the couple. Perhaps a religious extremist, or someone opposed to modern thinking who wanted to revive the barbarism and mass slaughter that marred the European continent not quite a century ago, might have it in for them. But somehow, Eugene was sure that this sort of motive was not what was behind the actions of "Elaine."

He continued to puzzle over it long after his plate was empty, forgetting that Rapunzel had not shown up in the common room to share the food. The crowd began to thin out, with those who were planning to stay the night heading upstairs, those who were continuing on their way leaving, and those who were apparently planning to exchange gossip and drink remaining in the common room. The barroom would close in thirty minutes. Eugene hardly noticed when the door to the Diamond and Dagger swung open and a tall figure dressed from head to toe in black—black shirt, black breeches, black boots, and a large black hood that completely shadowed his (for Eugene assumed it was a man's) face, stepped inside.

The traveler walked silently up to where Mr. Arkham still manned the bar and guest registry. Pascal dug his claws into Eugene's neck, jolting him out of his deep contemplation. He whirled his head around but saw nothing that struck his attention. The new customer paid for a room and silently headed for the stairs at the far end of the common room, opposite from the shadowed area where Eugene sat with his empty plate and empty mug.

"What was that about, frog?" Eugene hissed at the reptile. Pascal glowered at him for a second before cheeping furiously in alarm. "Oh, knock it off," he said in irritation. "I know I need to leave. In fact, fine, I'll head out right now." He stood up.

_"Eeeeeaaaaaaah!"_

A piercing, absolutely terrified, very feminine scream suddenly filled the common room. Eugene and everyone else in the common room stopped cold. His gaze shot over toward the staircase. The cry was coming from there. It was only a second, but during that brief moment the pitch shifted and the scream trailed off, ending with a sputtering or choking sound. There was a loud thud, as if something heavy had been thrown to the floor.

Arkham stormed away from the bar. "Is everything all right up there?" he called out.

A woman's melodic voice sounded down the stairs. "Oh yes, I just found a _rat_ up here, that's all."

Arkham frowned. "I'm really sorry about that, ma'am," he called out as he turned around and headed back to the bar. The patrons in the common room resumed their conversations.

All except for one. Eugene stood there, chills running down his spine. That scream and the voice that followed it did not sound to him like they came from the same person. He hardly knew what he feared, but he immediately resolved to wait outside after the common room was closed rather than continuing past the Corona borders to the next tavern. He paid the remainder of his bill and left the inn, but hovered to the side, below a window that would give a nice view of the common room even after the lights went out.

In about half an hour, Mr. Arkham shooed the remaining patrons out. Eugene ducked low so that no one would see him as they headed toward the road. When at last they had all dispersed and Arkham himself had gone to bed, Eugene peered over the ledge into the darkened common room, his heart pounding.

It was difficult to see very well, but within about five minutes, Eugene saw a figure emerge down the stairs and into the room. It looked like the person was dressed in black, and he thought at once that it might be the last traveler who had taken a room. The individual was carrying a large bundle wrapped up in some kind of dark cloth. He could not tell what sort of bundle it might be. The figure paused and gazed around the room for a moment, then, apparently convinced that it was empty, shuffled behind the bar and ducked below the counter.

There was a creak. Then some light footsteps. Another creak. A low, soft thud. Then the figure emerged once more, this time without the bundle, and turned back up the stairs. Even in the shadows, Eugene got a glimpse. The person was definitely dressed in men's clothes.

He stood beside a tall, half-denuded tree in the brisk air, his heart flying. He hardly knew what to think. Was that a smuggler stashing a bundle of liquor in one of the reputed caches that even this tavern contained? Reason told him that this was the most likely explanation, but something still troubled him. He could not get that scream out of his mind.

He didn't know how long he stood there. At last, though, he realized that he really needed to get to the other tavern. It was closer at this point than his own house was—and the last thing in the world he wanted to do was run into "Madame Elaine" on the infamous Amwald road at nighttime. For that matter, he thought darkly, she could probably get _into _his house though that passage, locked doors or not. She was in the neighborhood, armed, with plenty of blood on her hands already, and presumably hunting down Rapunzel.

Eugene pulled his hood over his head, keeping his face shadowed, and continued down the path. It was very late, but in a couple of hours he finally reached the other inn, the first inn outside Corona. He didn't even think to ask the night shift innkeeper if a young woman was staying there. He simply shuffled up to the room and collapsed on the bed. "Wake me up in the morning, lizard," he mumbled to Pascal.

* * *

**End Note:** I know this looks bleak—but I have more up my sleeve, so please don't stop reading yet.


	12. A Revelation and a Horror

**Chapter Twelve: A Revelation and a Horror**

* * *

When Eugene stumbled down to the common room the next morning to have breakfast, he couldn't help but notice the subdued attitude of the other patrons. A few glanced up as he entered the room, their eyes fixed upon the green chameleon that sat possessively on his shoulder, but most of them were sticking very close to their plates, huddling beneath their traveling cloaks and hunching their shoulders as if they were afraid that someone would swoop down and attack them. Eugene thought this was odd; this was not a disreputable inn or a particularly dangerous area. In fact, since this was officially outside the jurisdiction of Corona, criminals whose "home territory" was here tended to escape _to _the Amwald area and the woods, not _from _it.

Then it hit him that the subdued, leery, paranoid atmosphere was probably because news of the slaying had trickled out. If the wealthiest family in the state—the well-loved former rulers, in fact, who had no enemies that anyone knew of—could be slain in their own house, no one could be assumed to be safe. This idea returned his thoughts to that crime and what "Madame Elaine" could possibly have had as her motive for doing it.

It would have made more sense, Eugene thought, if they had still held political power, including the ability to issue arrest warrants. Even though the authorities had sharply recoiled from the superstitious excesses of the previous century, witchcraft was still a crime on the books, and they would have had more than enough evidence to issue a warrant for "Madame Elaine" if they knew of her activities. However, they had no such political power anymore, those who did have it had _not _issued a warrant, and there was no reason to believe that the Von Koronas had even known of the woman's existence.

Eugene sipped his water and thought some more. If the slaying had not been about "Elaine" herself, the only other possibility was that it had something to do with Rapunzel.

Suddenly Eugene remembered something: The night that Rapunzel had first shown up, she had told him that she had left that tower with the intention of going to Corona to request an audience with the royal family. She hadn't mentioned the idea after that, but that had been her original plan. In fact, Eugene recalled, she had been sure she had once _seen _the royals.

His brow furrowed as he tried to recall the rest of that conversation. What was it that she had said? Oh... that the people she remembered, whoever they were, had been interested in her hair.

Her hair. Which—Eugene suddenly realized with a start—had once held magical properties. _"It used to be long, really, really long, and blonde, and there was this spell my—mother—and I said that caused it to glow and heal anything it was touching. It could heal wounds, diseases, take away age..."_ That was what Rapunzel had said about her hair the last time he had seen her, the last night before she left that farewell note and disappeared.

Blonde hair. Healing magic.

Eugene suddenly felt the blood drain from his face. An idea had suddenly entered his mind, an idea which had occurred to him months ago when they first went to the city together. He had looked at the fading mural of the royal family and noted Rapunzel's striking resemblance to the Queen. He had dismissed it then because Rapunzel was brunette and he had not known she had ever been otherwise. And now what had once been a silly, patently absurd theory, something hardly worth a moment's consideration, was quickly cementing itself in his mind into clear, indisputable fact.

The reason that her hair properties had seemed familiar was because they _were _familiar. Eighteen years and some months ago, the old legend of a healing flower in the woods had been proven true. The flower had healed the Queen and saved her life and that of her daughter, born with unnaturally long and thick blonde hair.

Eugene could hardly sit still. His fingers trembled as he finished off the rest of his water. He didn't want to remain in this common room, but he didn't know where to go. With that woman prowling around, it was surely safer to be around people than alone in the woods. He tried to look calm and inconspicuous as the thoughts burst forth in rapid succession.

If Rapunzel had been the lost princess—and Eugene was now very convinced that she was—then it made terribly perfect sense why "Elaine" would have gone for the former royal family, especially if Rapunzel had ever mentioned those early memories to _her._ After all, that might have been one place that Rapunzel would run to.

But how, Eugene wondered, could this woman—an associate of Rapunzel's mother, nay, _false _mother—know about the connection? Had the false mother _told _her witchy associates? She must have. And if Rapunzel's false mother had been the kidnapper, why had she stolen a child? Presumably for the hair, Eugene realized.

Everything about this theory fit—except for one piece. Eugene could not understand why "Elaine" would go so far as to murder the couple. After all, he thought, _she _hadn't been the one to steal their child, or even their crown. Why should she care so much if she lost a slave laborer? Perhaps she feared that Rapunzel would tell other people about her dark activities and the royals would exert their influence to get a warrant issued for her arrest.

Eugene finally stood up from his seat and walked nervously toward the door. He knew what he had to do. It seemed vastly unlikely now that he would intercept Rapunzel. She hadn't shown herself in this inn and he figured that she may very well have continued traveling all night long, betting on getting an insurmountable head start on "Elaine" even if she had to do it in the dead of night. She had written in her letter that she was going to look for whatever knowledge she could find to help her counter her sinister colleague. Hopefully, she had been able to hire a cart and was out of reach of her pursuer.

As for him, he had to get into those catacombs. That was where the truth lay, in those underground tunnels that connected his house to the tower. There had to be a mountain of arcane knowledge in there. At least it would give him an idea of what he was truly up against. He wasn't going to get into them through the tower entrance, he realized; Rapunzel herself had confirmed that the woman had "sealed off" that spot. But there was another way in—a sliding wall in his own house.

Eugene was on high alert as he made the long walk back toward the forest village, stopping only at the Diamond and Dagger inn to grab a quick snack to eat along the way. While he was waiting for Mr. Arkham to bring out the food, he leaned over the bar at that inn and glanced at the space behind it. Last night, someone—that guest in black, the one he figured was a smuggler—had left something back there.

He strained his neck to see if he could notice anything suspicious or contraband, but nothing seemed out of place. The only aspect that was a bit off was that there seemed to be an aura of darkness around the spot, something vaguely sinister, as if the battered old wood concealed something dreadful. And yet it seemed to be calling to him, even pleading. For a brief moment Eugene had an incredibly strong inclination to go behind the bar, smash cabinets, and rip up planks from the floor until he found—what? He didn't know and could not understand why he was feeling this way. He felt a chill creep down his spine and tried to shake it off. He was just letting everything else get to him, he told himself. Just imagining things.

He continued along the road, munching on the bread and fruit he had picked up at the inn, keeping his eyes and ears open for any sign of danger in case "Elaine" still lurked somewhere in the area. Before long he heard rapid patters along the ground, rhythmic thumpings that were far too fast—and too numerous—to be human footsteps, and they were heading his way.

"Whoa!" Eugene exclaimed, nearly leaping off the path as a magnificent white horse bounded out of the woods toward him. The animal slowed down to a trot and turned around fluidly, coming up to Eugene and glaring at him. It stopped and regarded him sternly, as if waiting for him to do something.

This, Eugene realized, was the horse that the royal family had owned—the horse that he had once wanted to own himself—the horse that the crowd of travelers in the Diamond and Dagger last night had said had escaped into the woods. He peered at the animal's harnessing and noticed the name inscribed upon it: Maximus.

"Maximus?" Eugene said.

The horse whinnied affirmatively. He nudged Eugene with his head, not affectionately, but pushily. His brown eyes narrowed in a very humanlike way.

"All right," Eugene muttered, glancing darkly at the chameleon on his shoulder, "I don't know what it is with you all-knowing animals, or how _you _would know that _I'm_ looking for Rapunzel—or who she is—but... you know what, it doesn't matter. Maybe you _smell _her on me. We _were _pretty close the night before last." His lips curled up in a faint smirk at that memory. "All right, all right," he said as the horse's eyes narrowed at Eugene in extreme disapproval. "You want me to ride you? That suits me." The horse was already saddled up, and without further ado, Eugene climbed onto his back. At once, the animal took off toward Eugene's house.

They made much better time than Eugene would have made on foot, he had to grant that. This animal was _fast._ What would have been a multi-hour trip at a walking pace took only about one hour on horseback. When at last Maximus arrived at the manor house, it was barely noon.

"Pascal," Eugene said as he hurried into the house, shedding his cloak, "I don't think you should come with me this time. Why don't you go back to where Maximus is waiting? That way if _she _turns up, you can get away fast."

The chameleon seemed to agree, albeit reluctantly, for he scampered off Eugene's shoulder at once. Giving Eugene a parting look, he crept into a room and slipped out an open window. Eugene grabbed up a lantern and a box of matches and continued down the hallway.

He stood before the heavy, locked double doors of his unused banquet hall. He took a deep breath. This was it—he was going to find out what was _really _going on all this time, what Rapunzel had _really _gotten herself into, and what had come forward to meet her and engulf her. He brought out his keyring, unlocked the doors, and pushed them open. Then he walked stoutly into the room, towards the blank projection that Rapunzel said concealed an entrance to the passageway.

He peered closely at the edge of the wall. He had never noticed it before, but now that he was looking at it so closely, he realized that there was a hairline crack. He pressed his fingers against the narrow edge and pushed hard. The wall began to slide, exposing an opening—and a staircase that led down, toward the far wall of the room, underground and away from the house. It was headed in the precise direction of the tower.

When at last the wall was open enough for Eugene to get in, he took another deep breath. _I have no idea what I'm going to find in there,_ he thought, panic suddenly taking him. _There is no telling what that woman summoned. Rapunzel mentioned being held captive by "creatures."_ _I might die in there._ _I might actually die in this place._ But he resolved that if this did happen, he would not go down without a fight. He checked his belt, touching his dagger to reassure himself that it was still there. He struck a match, lit the lantern, and placed the box in his satchel. Then, steeling himself, he plunged into the darkness.

The stairs seemed to go on forever, but at last Eugene stopped his downward trek. The walls, which initially were made of heavy rough stone, quickly gave way to earth as the stairs ended. Eugene noticed that they were nonetheless sculpted out very precisely, with the whole corridor shaped like a rectangle rather than a blobby round tunnel. Every fifty feet or so an ancient, half-petrified beam of wood spanned the corridor from left to right.

This tunnel was terribly claustrophobic on one hand, and yet that yawning blackness that continued ahead of him for an immeasurable distance, a blackness that his lantern could not penetrate, nearly overcame him more than once. The disturbing story of Gothel Corvinus kept coming back to his mind. He owned her house. This corridor _had _to be the one that she had reputedly created, the one from which screams echoed so loudly that they could be heard aboveground. Or were there just openings, fissures somewhere ahead that led to the surface? Surely there had to be, for fresh air if nothing else, but no shafts of light had yet appeared.

Still, there had been screams. There had been screams—and disappearances. There had been dozens of people in that dark medieval time to disappear in this village without a trace. As he continued, his heart pounding, Eugene's quick imagination was peopling this black earthen corridor with unspeakable misshapen horrors. What if he ran into something that actually consumed him—something that left behind no trace of his body, no hint whatsoever of his fate? Was _this _what had happened to all those travelers?

_Rapunzel _had passed through this corridor, he thought suddenly, and with that thought, shame absolutely overpowered him. He should not have let this happen. He should not have let her become so desperate for love that she aligned herself with some evil old colleague of her false "mother." He should not have let her go into a place like this. He had let her down. He should have loved her and treated her honorably instead of deliberately treating her as an object of pleasure to convince himself that he didn't care. Damn it, he thought, he should have _listened _to her when she said she remembered the royal couple. It was certainly strange to think of her having infant memories, but with magic healing powers, who knew what side effects there might be? It was his fault that she would not get to know her real family now. With this thought, he nearly collapsed on the ground in shame—but something else then rose up in him. He might have failed her before, but he was going to fix this to the best of his ability.

He soldiered on. At last, when he figured he must have walked for a good two miles, he saw something different: a large wooden door frame just ahead of him to his left, and a pair of crude, plain, heavy wooden doors. They were closed. There was no doorknob or handle.

Eugene paused before the doors, breathing deeply. He leaned against them, trying to listen for any sounds that indicated he should not enter the room. _If anything alive is loose in there,_ he thought, _it should be able to push these doors open—but that hasn't happened. It ought to be all right._ Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he put a hand against one of the heavy doors and pushed it forward.

As the door swung open to reveal a room, something immediately caught Eugene's eye. About twelve feet on the other side of the room, light poured through a narrow shaft about six inches square. The shaft was about four feet off the ground. Apparently this part of the tunnel passed through a hill. The bright sunlight was extremely out of place in this world of earthen walls and darkness. As his eyes adjusted to it, he noticed the room itself coming into focus—and what he saw made his heart skip a beat.

The walls of this room were not earthen, but carved stone once more—and they were spattered with dark stains of what was surely ancient blood. A row of shackles lined one stone wall. In a corner was a rack, that torture device favored by the Inquisition—and apparently by one medieval witch. A heavy axe with its blade also stained dark was propped up in another corner. He also noticed the crop of a whip, the whip itself apparently dissolved into dust on the floor. The implications were horrible, and Eugene wanted to run from the room at once, but nothing in the room appeared to be recent, at least. _Rapunzel wasn't forced to torture anyone. This has to do with Gothel Corvinus four hundred, four hundred and fifty years ago, _Eugene told himself firmly. _I guess there's one mystery solved._ As calmly as he could manage, he exited the room and closed the doors behind him. He took yet another deep breath and continued down the corridor again.

Before long he found himself with another such door, this time on his right. He leaned against it to check for sounds. Hearing none, he pushed these doors in as well. Light poured into this room from another shaft, a larger one than before, this time located in the ceiling. Directly below it was a grate, which Eugene assumed led to some kind of subterranean well. Otherwise, he thought, this kind of shaft could cause the whole tunnel system to flood if it was raining aboveground. He peered around this room. It was smaller than the first one, and it seemed to be a place of civilization rather than barbarism. A battered old table stood next to the far wall, with a bench on one side.

Something was resting on the table. Eugene edged into the room and went over to have a look. At once he noticed that the materials on the table were ancient scrolls, so old and so decrepit that some of them crumbled at his touch. He did not dare try to unroll any more of them, but one was already laid out on the table. He peered over it. Strange, occult symbols uncannily like those he had seen in that document he had found at Rapunzel's tower filled the scroll. Some of them were crossed through. Others had annotations in an extremely archaic form of language. Most of the annotations were in Latin, but Eugene was pretty sure he also recognized some Arabic.

_Well,_ he thought, _old Gothel Corvinus did know Arabic, apparently. Her father went on the Crusades and brought back books in Arabic._ As he recalled this part of the old history, another thought suddenly entered his mind. Could the medieval witch have used the Necronomicon too? It must have been around by the thirteenth century... according to all he had ever heard about it, it was extant by the eighth century. And it came out of that part of the world.

There was nothing in this room but the table and fragile scrolls, so Eugene left it and went back into the earthen corridor, leaving the doors open to allow the light to enter the hallway. Even if it stirred something up that might be lurking down the corridor, he figured that his lantern would have done _that _anyway, and at least this way he would have more of a head start on it. He held out his lantern in front of him for extra light and noticed at once that about fifty feet ahead, four more doorways awaited him on both sides of the hallway. Eagerly now he headed toward the first one, pushing the doors open and bounding in.

This room did not have a shaft of light anywhere. Instead an unlit lantern dangled from the ceiling. Eugene did not bother to light it. He held his own out and noticed the long wooden boxes stacked against the far wall. Coffins, dozens of them, all of them apparently of varying ages, some of them falling apart, others looking very modern. Well, Gothel Corvinus had been a grave-robber, he thought, and "Elaine" was involved in such trafficking too. But these coffins seemed to be all empty. Was this nothing but a storage room, he wondered? If so, where were the remains kept?

Disappointed, he left and continued on to the second door. He pushed against these doors—and they did not move. He then noticed the lock, something that none of the other doors had had.

Eugene frowned. The fears that he had first felt suddenly flooded back; what if _this _room held something dangerous and that was why it had to be locked? He peered through the keyhole. There was a shaft of light somewhere behind those doors too, because the room was not completely pitch black. There were no sounds coming from behind that door. He strained his eyes, trying to see into the room—and at last managed to focus on what he was pretty sure were bookshelves. _This _might be Rapunzel's famed book room, he thought excitedly—but how could he get in? He opened his satchel and brought out a woman's hatpin. This was a tool he had long used to pick locks back in his days as a thief. He stuck it into the keyhole and went to work. Within seconds the lock clicked open, and Eugene flung the doors wide.

At once he realized that he was mistaken. This was not the subterranean library. The shelves were filled not with bound and published tomes, nor even medieval scrolls, but piles of handwritten notes and laboratory equipment. A long table sat out in this room as well, with flasks neatly arranged on it. A couple of books lay open on the table, but they were the only books in the room. It was strikingly reminiscent of Rapunzel's old "laboratory" in his house. This, he recognized, was a workroom. Immediately he strode over to the table and looked at the book that lay open on it.

There was something strangely familiar about it. His eye immediately was drawn to a paragraph that was underlined heavily in black ink, a paragraph that read as follows:

"_The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of human Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."_

Suddenly Eugene's thoughts turned to another day in another room. He had read this paragraph before. This was what he had seen that one day that he had gone into Rapunzel's laboratory while she had chemicals laid out on the table just as they were laid out here. This book was there too, open to this very page. He had not thought about it since he had seen it; so much else had happened, but now, in light of the hideous rumors regarding the Stabbington brothers and the known importation of coffins in this woman's name, it made terrible sense as to why the book would be open to this page on this table. Eugene did not want to acknowledge the idea that entered his head immediately, which was that apparently Rapunzel too had been interested in this passage for some reason.

He shifted his gaze and looked at the nearest pile of handwritten notes. They were written in a modern hand, he noticed—but not Rapunzel's. Rapunzel's hand was fresh in his mind, since he had a letter of hers waiting for him back in his house. Her hand was jaunty and happy. This was very unlike hers. He squinted to read it. It was dated recently.

_1 October 1701._

_My esteemed friend E. H.—_

_I confess myself at an impasse with the formulae. The method that my girl used to raise up my body is sufficient for all occasions when no alteration of the form is required, but as you know, some of Them have need of being raised up in a form that can be better controlled. It is a crude art, I have found, and the use of pure chemistry for this purpose is not sufficient as I had hoped it would be. I think there is corruption of the Salts when this crude method is employed, and I am glad that I discovered it with the debased specimens that I did rather than destroying the ash of one superior and thus losing any hope of questioning that one. The S. twins, I have found, were raised up in a dull, stupid form, seemingly without a will of their own, unable to do anything without being told to do so, and you know I employed chemical arts upon their relics and then raised them up with the usual formula. If this method were used upon one greater, the Salts would be irretrievably ruined. There must be a way, a formula that can be modified or discovered to raise Them up in a controllable fashion without sacrificing quality._

_I deeply regret the failure with M. and M. le F. I know they were difficult to come by and cost you a great deal of trouble. I misdirected those damnable meddling officials; they will not disturb you when they go investigating. It is a shame that the seizure happened, and yet I know I am not yet ready to handle them, with the standstill at which I find myself with the formulae. Until this matter is resolved, I doubt I can take the next step and unleash those beings I know from the shadow-world. They, or others of similar capacity, would be the only ones who might know how to do this, but as you well know, the problem is raising up one with such power. There is a peril in that._

_I am afraid I will soon have to rid myself of the girl. She has become restless and discontent, a situation that I attribute to that worthless squatting rascal for whom she has been such a slut. He shall definitely die—but, and perhaps I am soft, I would rather not kill her unless she leaves me with no choice. She has a remarkably quick mind and worked out in a matter of weeks what I was unable to for—you know how long. (I will grant, of course, that the girl has had the benefit of immediate access to the works of all the thinkers through the years, and has had the natural exuberance of youth and energy, while I would grow tired and weak at merely a short walk. I was utterly dependent upon the flower and hair magic, much in the same way as one would become dependent upon the Elixir of Life, and in its own way, it was a life of hell. I would almost thank her for freeing me of that accursed dependency. This body has few needs and does not deteriorate, held together as it is by the formula.) If I do take this drastic step, know that I will certainly make it a priority to discover any way of controlling Those, and may indeed raise her back up in the desired way. But I think at the moment she is sniffing about for the method of putting Them down, to presume to use it against ME. I have the secret hidden and will not show it to her, and I implore you, should you receive any letters from her asking for this knowledge, do not tell it to her, for this is what she purposes with it._

_With warmest regards and friendship,_

_G. C._

Eugene set the letter down with shaking hands. His thoughts were whirling, and he hardly knew what to make of what he had just read. The letter was addressed to that same character in Transylvania from whom Rapunzel had once received a letter. That, however, was the one thing that made logical sense. The rest of the letter seemed to be plain lunacy.

And yet on second glance, it was far, terribly far, from lunacy. The "S. twins"—surely those were the Stabbington brothers, and their dimwitted, out-of-touch behavior, as described by the Duckling ruffians, matched this description all too well. "M. and M. le F."—that had to be Merlyn and Morgana le Fay, two illustrious names attached to the shipment of coffins that had been seized, but of course, far too powerful and perilous to be brought back _uncontrolled_. That "Elaine" was playing at necromancy seemed beyond dispute now, and all the allusions to "raising Those" hardly even merited Eugene's notice anymore.

Eugene sat down at the table and tried to think. The writer of this letter had mentioned flower and hair magic, which could mean only one thing. And yet… Eugene's gaze trailed back to the beginning of the letter. _"The method that my girl used to raise up my body."_

"Oh my God," Eugene gasped as he put it together. This wasn't a colleague of Rapunzel's pseudo-mother. It _was _her pseudo-mother. _That _was why the woman looked so damned familiar; the familiarity was with that horribly realistic portrait Rapunzel had painted, the portrait that had been destroyed either in that lightning bolt that wasn't, or when Rapunzel chanted the ritual that brought the woman back to earth and back to life. "Beings from the shadow-world" to be unleashed? That was horribly similar to the language in Rapunzel's letter. _"Entities that she encountered in the place I brought her out of,"_ Rapunzel had written. These "entities" that she intended to unleash, once she learned how to do so from more illustrious minds, were demons, evil spirits like herself that apparently _had _no body that could be raised up for them. They were prevented from troubling the world by some unknown metaphysical barrier that this woman was trying with all her might to break down.

Rapunzel had brought her back from the dead out of grief—and had been rewarded with this. _Rapunzel, _he realized with horror, had been playing in necromancy too. Eugene felt sick at the thought. _She only did it because she loved this woman and thought she was her mother,_ he told himself. _She said herself, several times, that she didn't mean for all this to happen. She did not act with evil intent._ Repeating these thoughts to himself seemed to give him some comfort—but not much. There was no getting past the fact that, after the "experiment" had succeeded, Rapunzel had lied repeatedly to Eugene about who the woman really was. Perhaps she was acting out of fear, but whatever it was, she had not trusted him enough to tell the truth. That hurt.

This, then, was why Rapunzel had mentioned the urn in her farewell note; of course the urn had contained the dust of her "mother"—the dust to which she had turned when Rapunzel cut off her magic hair. But why had _that _happened? The woman had mentioned a dependency, but still...

Eugene glanced at the letter again, this time at the initials. "G. C."—so she wasn't even pretending to be "Elaine" in this correspondence. The inference of those initials seemed obvious to him, since he had been thinking so much about the medieval character who walked this tunnel and bore the initials, but surely that was impossible. –Though by this time, Eugene was wondering if the word "impossible" even had a right to exist.

He thought about it. If the woman had used the _flower _magic before Rapunzel's hair magic, then there really was no limit on how old she could be. He thought back to the history he had once read about Gothel Corvinus. When she was 94, she had appeared to the knights of Corona as a haggard old woman, but the sight that had sent the mob after her was that of a hundred-year-old but physically _young _woman raiding a graveyard. If she'd had access to the magic flower, as even some people of the thirteenth century had speculated she might, then this made sense.

This tunnel system, too, was so incredibly vast that it had to be the work of a very long time. Travelers had disappeared in this part of the country for as long as anyone could remember. What was to say that she hadn't been kidnapping other people for slave labor long before she decided to kidnap a baby for its magic power? And of course, once she was done with them, they would be free bodies for her to experiment upon, trying throughout those centuries of "dependency" on the flower to work out the right chemical composition to reduce them to dust—or "Salts"—and the right sayings to bring them back.

He glanced at the letter one last time. There _was _a method of "putting down" someone who had been brought back, of reducing the simulacrum to the "Salts" from which it was made. This horrible, ancient witch had hidden the information from Rapunzel, knowing that Rapunzel was seeking it to use against her. This too seemed to be confirmed in Eugene's mind; after all, that was exactly what Rapunzel had run away to look for. It was somewhere here, buried in some room in this tunnel. He just had to find out where.


	13. A Discovery and a Confrontation

**Chapter Thirteen: A Discovery and a Confrontation**

* * *

Eugene did not know how long he remained in that workroom, shuffling through papers, trying to find the spell that Gothel had hidden from Rapunzel. The papers were filled with handwritten notes (almost all of them in the old witch's hand rather than Rapunzel's) and cryptic symbols, but nothing he could decipher seemed to contain anything except list after list of chemical ingredients—most of which had been scratched through and marked worthless after some failed attempt—and instructions on how to make the "Salts" with these ingredients and the remains of the victims (as Eugene had come to think of them—and he wouldn't be surprised if some of them _were _in fact murdered by Gothel). There were some incantations mixed in with the instructions, but the notes in the margins made it quite clear that these spells were only for the purpose of alchemy, not necromancy.

Eugene tried to recall what had happened that disturbing day that Rapunzel had been yelling and shouting in the room in his house. That, he realized, was when the resurrection had taken place. She had shouted something in some ancient language that he could not understand—and then there had been a laugh that was not hers, followed by a strange muttering that he was sure sounded exactly like a dialogue. Now, he realized that _it had been._ A shudder rippled down his back as it fully dawned on him that the murderous necromancer had been in his _house _just a few doors away. Rapunzel had been joyous that night—of _course, _he realized. She thought she had brought back her mother. Later that night, Rapunzel had led the old woman down the hallway, hidden under something dark, but even from the dim light of his bedroom, he had caught a glimpse. He'd thought it was a huge bag of dirt and trash from the room. Another shudder rippled over him.

Yet for all these memories, now put together and fully understood in his mind, he could not recall what that final alien chant was that Rapunzel had said. He thought he might recognize it again if he saw it in writing, but there was nothing that jogged his memory in these papers.

At last Eugene realized that he needed to move on. There were two more rooms left to check, in any case. He left the subterranean laboratory, with its simmering pile of chemicals and powders, and locked the door behind him. He was sure that Gothel was on the road, but if he had to abandon this project today, he did not want to even run the risk of her returning and finding that the place had been tampered with.

The next door was not locked. Eugene immediately thought that if the woman had not acted to keep Rapunzel out of this room, it surely could not contain the spell she was trying to hide. However, he went ahead and pushed the doors open.

At once light dazzled his eyes. A large hole in the ceiling, this one easily two feet across, led to the surface through a twenty-foot vertical channel that could easily pass for an abandoned well if anyone happened to stumble across it. Directly below it on the floor was another grate, and the light illuminated what Eugene realized was the elusive bookroom. Bookshelves filled every wall, all of them packed solid with tomes. As Eugene scanned the shelves, he realized that most of the books were not even about magic or demonology or any such occult subject. A lot of them were of mundane topics, or were fictional. Rapunzel had likely read many of these books as a young girl, for _this _was certainly a library large enough to account for her early insistence that her "mother" had brought back all kinds of books to the tower.

Eugene went over to what seemed to be the occult bookcase and scanned the shelves. He tried to remember everything he had read pertaining to this. There was that early letter from the creepy character in Transylvania, the one he had snatched from Rapunzel's laboratory and read with such jealous indignation that day. What was it that the old man had said? There was something important in that letter, he was sure of it...

Suddenly it hit him. That was the first time he had heard any reference to the Necronomicon in connection with this case. _"The volume by Abdul Al-Hazred is hard to come by,"_ the man had said, but was _"likely a necessity."_ Eugene realized that this book must contain the spell that Rapunzel had used to raise Gothel Corvinus's body, and it probably contained a counterspell as well. At once he began scanning the shelves for that particular title—or any book that looked large enough to be it, for it immediately occurred to him that the old hag might try to disguise the book with a false cover.

Unfortunately, no such book was to be found, and after another half hour of scanning this shelf and all the rest, Eugene concluded that his initial impression about the unlocked doors was correct. The Necronomicon was not in this library, and it was not in the workroom. He realized he had to rule out the tower as well, because it would have been asinine for the woman to leave it in reach of Rapunzel if it contained information that could be used for her undoing. In any case, he did not really want to have to go to the tower, because the "creature" guards of which Rapunzel had spoken—and of whose origin Eugene did not want to think—might have returned there. It was also distinctly possible that the tower was just as inaccessible from this tunnel as the tunnel was from the tower now. That left three options: It was behind the fourth door, there were unknown other doors concealed in the dark hallway that might conceal it, or the woman had brought it with her for her journey. As Eugene left the library and let the heavy wooden doors swing shut behind him, he found himself hoping desperately that the fourth door was it.

This door, he found, _was _locked. The hatpin came out of his satchel again, and within a minute, he had picked the lock. He tentatively edged the door open and peered around.

This room was much smaller than the library, but it was also full of shelves. These shelves were plain, and they were filled with pottery. Straight ahead was a gaping doorway that appeared to lead to another room, but neither the room ahead nor this room (a storage room?) had the benefit of natural light. Eugene shone his lantern around, at last finding a hanging lantern attached to the wall of the storage area. He brought out his box of matches and lit this lantern, providing steady illumination to the shelf room.

Eugene set down his own lantern and scanned over the jugs and pots. There seemed to be two kinds, one with a single handle and one with no handles. All the handle-less jars were on one wall and all the jugs with handles were on the other. As Eugene examined them more closely, he noticed that all of them bore numbered tags around their necks. He craned his neck upward and noticed, for the first time, that there were two signs, one on each wall. The sign above the jugs with handles read "Materia" and the sign above the plain jugs read "Custodes."

Eugene, being an educated man, immediately recognized these words as Latin for "materials" and "guards." Yet another shudder rippled down him as the implications sank in. Guards—that could refer to the "creatures" that Gothel had put in place to "guard" Rapunzel in the tower. There were numbers, which undoubtedly referred to a list somewhere (Eugene glanced quickly around the room for such a list, and, finding none, realized it had to be in the room to which this one opened), and he could find out just what "creatures" the witch had in her possession if he so desired. But the other shelf—the "materials"—did these jugs contain the "Salts" of all the eminent dead that this woman and her cohort had been collecting, raising up to pick their brains of whatever knowledge they might have of barriers between worlds? That was what she ultimately intended... he knew that from the letter he had found in the underground workroom...

Eugene grabbed one jug at random by its handle and unstoppered it. Perhaps a bit too eagerly he tilted the jug over his other hand. A smooth, fine-grained powder slid out. It was very lightweight, and it seemed to be utterly frictionless. He poured it back into the jug, trembling a little at the thought of exactly what he was holding in his hand, and noted that not a single grain remained on his hand.

_Naturally,_ he thought. _It just wouldn't do for any part to be lost._ Grimly he replaced the jug on the shelf and continued into the next room.

At once a foul chemical stench blasted him. As vile as it was, it was very evocative, triggering a memory that Eugene struggled to place for a moment—but only a moment. He quickly remembered what this smell was. It was one of the smells that had issued forth from _Rapunzel's_ laboratory that day that she had resurrected her "mother." With an uneasy glance back at the shelves of "Salt"-containing jugs, Eugene continued into the gloom.

The room before him was still mostly dark, barely illuminated by the lantern in the storage area, but as Eugene brought his own lantern in, the contents became clear. He could make out a chair, a small table with a handwritten manuscript and a heavy book (his heart thumped at this sight, immediately thinking it might be _that book)_, and three small shallow bowls on the floor. One of them was filled with a powder; the other two were empty. There were also three jugs rather like those in the storage room, one with a handle and two without. The entire room was made of chiseled stone, and from the look of it, it had been carved out of a solid slab rather than built from blocks. As Eugene shone his light upon the walls, he noticed that the walls themselves had been marked with chalk. Occult symbols and spells in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Old English, and other languages that Eugene could not even identify filled the walls. His gaze darted down to the floor, where he noticed a large pentagram carved into the rock.

However, he did not make much note of this. This room, he realized, had to be where the woman raised up... whatever, whomever, she raised up. His gaze shot straight to the book and the list on that small table. Taking a seat in the chair and setting his lantern down on the table to give himself some light, he picked up the manuscript—and realized at once what sort of document it was. The title "Materia" headed up the first page.

A long list of numbers and names filled his eyes—some of them esteemed figures that any educated man would know of (his stomach churned at the thought of how many graves that Gothel and her "friends" had disturbed), others more obscure characters that he did not recognize, and quite a few names belonging to individuals long thought to be mere myth and legend. Apparently they were not. The name of Beowulf was present, but Merlyn and Morgana le Fay, he noticed, did not appear on the list—so either the shipment of coffins had indeed been sent back where it belonged, or perhaps the woman just had not reduced these remains to their "essential Salts" yet. He noted grimly that the names of the late Stabbington brothers had made the list, though Gothel had starred both of them and written at the bottom "Defective salts—must be commanded. Consider relisting as Guards." Eugene grimaced and set the list aside.

He opened the cover of the heavy book and found at once that his guess about it was correct. His heart began to thump. Here was the tome he had been looking for. This tome undoubtedly contained the spell to raise up a body from these "Salts" and force its departed spirit back to earth, to be "guarded" and interrogated and tortured into giving up whatever information it might have that would serve Gothel's ultimate ends. But it also had to contain a way of putting the body back down.

Eugene did not really want to flip idly through the book, given its horrible reputation even in the criminal underworld. He could not help but feel that just touching the pages would contaminate him with who knew what, and he also had no idea where to look. If he said the wrong spell, summoned a demon, brought something upon himself, he did not want to think about the consequences. He closed the cover, his heart thumping with anxiety, and let his gaze drift to the marked-up walls.

He passed over the Latin, Greek, and other recognizable languages, focusing—for some reason he could not explain—instead on what had before seemed like indecipherable gibberish. A second look made it plain that, gibberish though it might be, there was an order to it. Eugene noticed two specific spells appearing over and over in faded white chalk. There were minor variations to the spelling and punctuation, but in the newest, boldest, most prominent version read as follows:

Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,  
_YOG-SOTHOTH_  
H'EE-L'GEB  
F'AI THRODOG  
_UAAAH_

OGTHROD AI'F  
GEB'L-EE'H  
_YOG-SOTHOTH_  
'NGAH'NG AI'Y  
_ZHRO_

Eugene felt prickles of goosebumps dart over his whole body as he mentally ran over the pronunciation of the first spell. Said a certain way, it was _exactly _the spell Rapunzel had used the day that she raised Gothel. The memory of that day filled his brain again, the disturbing rhythm of the spell as enunciated in her clear voice—a voice that had _no _business saying such a thing, Eugene thought protectively. He then glanced at the other spell. It was almost a syllabically backward version of the first one, with the exception of the last word and the italicized name in the middle. It was the counterspell—it just had to be! Eugene began mumbling the pair under his breath, trying to fix them permanently in his mind.

He only stopped when he noticed the smoke rising from the small powder-containing bowl in the corner, growing thicker and thicker...

There was a flash of light from inside the cloud of smoke, and Eugene fell to the ground unconscious.

* * *

The next thing Eugene was aware of was sunlight—specifically, the sunlight of his own bedroom. He opened his eyes fully and found himself lying in his bed, looking face to face at a small nervous-looking chameleon. He frowned. Had that all been a dream?

But why was he wearing his clothes in bed? His shoes, in fact? Why could he not recall actually going to bed?

And what was that note on the side table?

With trepidation, Eugene reached over and picked up the note. He squinted. This was not a modern hand, he noticed. It was written in medieval characters from a period even earlier than anything he had seen in Gothel's papers, and he could just barely decipher it.

_Ye wytch must be kil'd. Ye bodie must be broke downe and naught kept. Seek me not, for I have knowinge of howe to go back whence I came._

Eugene rotely placed the note in his satchel and put his hands over his face. It was not a dream. It really had happened. The spell he had been muttering in that dark, sinister subterranean room had raised up... whom? The note was unsigned. Someone—or some_thing_—from at least two hundred years before Gothel's own birth, he guessed, and clearly someone who knew about the kind of barriers and paths that Gothel had sought to open, since the note itself said that its author knew how to "go back" to wherever it had come from. He shuddered at the thought of just how close the woman had come to finding out exactly what she wanted to know.

Or had she? There had been two more jars in that room, the sort without handles, the sort that had belonged on the "guards" shelves. Had Gothel anticipated that this person would prove hostile and had the "Salts" for guardian beings for her own protection? Had she perhaps _already _brought it back and found it uncooperative?

Eugene decided that it was pointless to speculate about that. The person, though obviously powerful and dangerous, had somehow realized that _he _did not have evil intent, and it had chosen to spare his life. Yet it had _not _chosen to take on Gothel itself, but had left that task to him.

Eugene suddenly remembered the man in Transylvania, who was deeply involved in the whole scheme, and according to Rapunzel had been a colleague of her "mother" for a long time. There might well be other such colleagues. Indeed, there had to be, given the sheer number of tombs that had been defiled, and the fact that they had come from far-flung places. That was not the work of two people, or even two people and a few thugs magically enslaved to them. Perhaps, Eugene thought, this person he had inadvertently brought back was going to take care of the other conspirators.

He got out of bed and shuffled downstairs in the direction of the banquet hall. He had no idea how much time had passed since he was in that crypt, and the idea of the gaping chasm of horrors remaining open to his house set his teeth on edge. He opened the heavy doors and strode over to the segment of wall that opened to the tunnel. Gripping the corner, he heaved as hard as he could.

The wall did not budge.

Eugene moved closer to the edge and peered at the side. The hairline crack that used to be there was now gone. He thought for a fraction of a second about trying to blast the wall open with gunpowder, but immediately he realized that there was no point. The person, or entity, that had brought him out had sealed off the entrance. Now both entrances were shut. If he succeeded at the task that had been set before him, no one need ever discover that pit again. Eugene couldn't help but think that it was a good thing.

Pascal was waiting for him outside the room when he emerged into the hallway. He took one look at the chameleon and shook his head. "No, Pascal," he said as he continued down the hallway. "Not this time." He paused. "If I don't come back, then... you have to get away from here, away from this house, because it might not be safe. Maybe try to find Rapunzel." He swallowed hard, and with a final parting look, walked out the front door into the yard, where Maximus was waiting for him.

He mounted the horse and glanced up at the sky. Based on the position of the sun, it had to be around midday. At least one night—hopefully not more than that—had passed since his excursion into the crypt. He turned to the horse, feeling foolish, but at this point, talking to an animal was hardly the strangest thing he had ever done.

"You think you can find her?" he asked.

The horse nodded its head in a shockingly humanlike way. Then, before Eugene knew it, Maximus took off at a swift gallop.

* * *

Eugene hung on for dear life as Maximus tore down the road, seemingly with unending energy, heading through the village, down the long stretch of empty road, in the direction of the national border. The horse stopped at last at the Diamond and Dagger Inn, where Eugene had eaten supper when he went looking for Rapunzel, and where he had heard about the murder of her true family.

Eugene felt confused. "Here, Maximus? You're sure about this?" It didn't make sense to him that Gothel would have made it only as far as this inn, which wasn't even outside Corona.

The horse glared back at him.

"All right, all right," Eugene said, dismounting and heading for the doors. "But I don't know where—what are you doing?"

For the horse was following him inside.

"You can't come in, Max," Eugene said, trying to push the animal away. "They won't let you—"

"Rider, get that thing under control!" called out Mr. Arkham the innkeeper from behind the bar.

"I can't—he's determined—"

Mr. Arkham hurried around the bar and met Eugene at the foyer. He stared at Maximus for a moment before bursting out, "Wait a second, isn't that the horse—"

"Yes," Eugene said. "It is. _He_ found _me_ in the woods. I don't know why he's so damned determined to come inside."

Eugene had only just finished his sentence when Maximus, with an air of irritation and impatience, pushed aside both men and trotted directly into the pub. It was empty of patrons at this hour.

"Beast!" Mr. Arkham called out sharply, but Maximus continued behind the bar. He began fiddling at the taps with his hooves. "I don't care if you _did_ belong to a royal family, I won't stand for—what the—"

Eugene and Arkham watched as a segment of floor fell down, opening a trapdoor to another tunnel—this one, at least, closer to the surface. Maximus turned around and glared pointedly at Eugene.

Suddenly a bad memory surfaced in his mind, the memory of a black-garbed traveler going behind the bar in the darkness, carrying a heavy parcel on the way downstairs—but not the way back. A sick feeling formed in his stomach as it dawned on him exactly what the parcel might have been, who the traveler was, and what likely awaited him in this secret hiding place. He realized that in the back of his mind he had feared this all along, this terrible, tragic turn of his thoughts, but would not openly acknowledge it until now, when it was forced upon him.

"Wait," he said in a choked voice to Arkham. "I think I know why... he led me here... and why he..." Eugene trailed off, staring at that hole in the floor with increasingly despairing eyes. He took a deep breath and turned again to the befuddled innkeeper. "I have to go in there," he said, trying to muster up some inner strength.

The man nodded, still stunned by this turn of events.

Eugene went behind the bar and lifted up the lantern that Arkham had hung on the wall. Carrying this, he took another deep breath and descended into the passage.

Maximus emerged from behind the bar and nudged the innkeeper. Arkham turned to the horse, who was looking woefully at him, and patted the side of the animal's head while they waited for Eugene to come back with whatever he was looking for down there.

In a minute, an anguished cry rent the room. _"NO!"_ Eugene shouted from below the floor. "Oh my God, _no!"_

The innkeeper froze in place. The horse nuzzled his head against the man's shoulder. In a second, open sobs came up from the passage, along with indecipherable despairing moans. There was some shuffling of what sounded like fabric. Then, at last, heavy footsteps began to sound, growing louder and louder.

Eugene emerged from the storage room, his eyes red and his face tear-stained, but his features set in grim, deadly resolution. He was carrying something completely covered in dark fabric. It was draped over his arms exactly like...

Mr. Arkham gasped in horror as he realized what Eugene was carrying. As if to confirm his thoughts, a delicate, feminine hand, unnaturally white, fell out from under the dark cloth.

Eugene came out of the secret room, walked around the bar, and handed his burden over to the innkeeper without a word. The man slumped down on the floor, absolutely stunned and horrified. "Who did this?" he whispered.

Eugene's eyes were filled with pain, deep pain, but also determination. "The same person who did for the Von Koronas," he said, hatred seeping from his words.

"How do you—"

"I just know," Eugene said curtly. He made to mount Maximus, but the innkeeper spoke again.

"What... what do we need to do?" Arkham said feebly, still clutching the bundle as he sat on the floor.

Eugene stopped and turned around. His eyes were flashing with a dark fire that made Arkham shudder. "This is no ordinary crime," he said in a cold voice. "The authorities will not be brought into this. It is beyond them. You have _no idea _how far it is beyond them," he said darkly. "But I'm going to find the witch—oh yes, Arkham—the _witch_ who did this, and she _will_ pay."

At that moment, the young man was speaking with such ruthless determination that Arkham had no doubt of the truth of his words. Whoever was on the wrong end of this young man's present wrath would _not _fare well, Arkham knew.

"Stay here," Eugene said as he mounted Maximus. "I'll be back to... recover... her..." He trailed off, and for a moment, his grim resolution seemed to shatter into broken fragments. But then it came right back, and with a deep breath, Eugene turned Maximus around and galloped out of the inn.

* * *

Eugene tried to keep despair out of his thoughts as Maximus tore furiously down the road, well past the border. There would be plenty of time for that. What was most important right _now _was to remove the menace from the world, and he could _not _let anything distract him in the looming confrontation, not even grief.

After about an hour, Maximus slowed down. A building was coming into sight. Eugene squinted as he drew nearer. Waite's Tavern, a fading sign read.

Maximus did not go all the way up to the tavern, veering off instead a little bit into the woods. All of a sudden he ducked behind a rock and stopped. Eugene dismounted, hearing twigs snap and leaves crackle as he hit the ground. He peered around the rock.

There she was.

It was definitely Rapunzel's former colleague, and it was definitely the same person who had appeared in the lost portrait. She was dressed head to toe in black, this time in female clothing, and a nasty smirk adorned her face.

"Well, you have something that can track better than you can yourself, I see," Gothel said sardonically.

Maximus snorted angrily through his nostrils, but Eugene held out an arm to keep the horse from charging the woman.

"You're quite right," he said coldly, "and now that this horse _has_ found you, it's time for a reckoning."

Gothel smiled. "A reckoning? All by yourself? You have no idea what you're up against, Rider."

"Oh yes I do," he said darkly. "I have been in your crypt, read your notes, and I have _seen _what you were doing down there. I saw your workroom, your bookroom, and I saw your closet full of jars—_and _the room beyond it."

Gothel looked startled, but quickly recovered herself. "Oh, _have_ you? Naturally, of course, a thief would know how to pick locks and burglarize places where he has no business and no right to be." Her voice sneered and seethed. "But if you had known the words to bring up what I had laid out in the bowl, you wouldn't be here with any such 'reckoning.' You know the saying 'curiosity killed the cat,' Rider?"

Eugene stared out icily. "I _did _speak the words... and it came."

Gothel turned pale. "What are you saying?" For the first time ever, her voice wavered.

Eugene suddenly remembered the note in his satchel. Without a word, he reached into the bag and brought it out, holding it up for the woman to see.

She gasped, and those gray eyes grew so wide that the whites of her eyes completely surrounded her irises. Eugene put the note back in his satchel and continued. "I don't know who or what wrote that note," he said, "but it's out there, right now, and I think it will take care of your 'friends.' And that's not all, _Gothel Corvinus," _he said, glaring at the woman with pure hate. "I know how you kept yourself alive through the years, how you terrorized the village, how you stole a child and used her for almost her whole life"—here he had to choke back a sob—"and how, after she finally cast you off, you sent evil messages to her in her dreams, manipulated her better feelings, and drew her back to your accursed tower to bring you back to life!"

Gothel let out a nasty laugh. "You're too late for her, Rider. I took care of her—and now I'll do what I _always _intended to do, as soon as I learned of your wretched, parasitic existence, and take care of _you."_

"I know I was too late for her," Eugene said, his words surprisingly steady. His eyes flashed with hatred. "I've been by the Diamond and Dagger inn already, Gothel. I know. But I'm _not_ too late to _avenge_ her." He raised a hand.

Gothel drew back, a sneer forming on her face, and began to chant in a low, ritualistic voice. The air became chill, and a wind whipped up the fallen leaves around them. The sky, already shrouded by clouds that had begun to gather as soon as he left the inn, grew dark.

But Eugene stood his ground. He had expected this. Keeping his hand raised, he summoned the memory of the _other _spell, the one this witch had kept hidden from Rapunzel because she knew—she _knew_—that it would be her undoing. And so it would be. Both spells seemed burned into his brain, needing only a reminder to burst forth in their entirety. His eyes were fixed upon the chanting woman before him as he began to speak.

"OGTHROD AI'F  
GEB'L-EE'H  
_YOG-SOTHOTH_  
'NGAH'NG AI'Y  
_ZHRO!"_

As he spoke the first line, Gothel's face froze in place, her mouth permanently fixed in a wide O, as if something was happening to her to prevent her from moving her lips. She flailed her arms wildly, but this motion also ceased as Eugene continued to utter the incantation. At last, with the utterance of the third line, she began to—Eugene could hardly stand to look—to _come apart,_ her skin turning rapidly into a pale purplish-gray shade that could be no human color. Eugene wanted to look away, but he continued resolutely. _Rapunzel watched something like this happen, _he thought sternly, remembering what she had told him about the transformation of the woman's body into dust, _and so will you._

With the final syllable, the form before him, surely already nonliving, a sculpture of dust held together by a thread, collapsed to the leafy ground, leaving only a coating of purplish powder on the dead leaves. A wind—a natural one brought on by the looming storm, rather than some evil wind of black magic—picked up the leaves, and the vile dust upon them, and scattered the powder, spreading it thin. It was impossible that anyone could ever gather it again.

Eugene, finally overcome, collapsed to his knees. He put his head in his hands. The sobs that he had been withholding the whole time gushed forth. Maximus ambled up to his side and bent his forelegs, sitting on the ground.

The horse nuzzled Eugene comfortingly just as the cold rain started to fall.

* * *

**End Note:** I know. But there is one more chapter, so please stick around for it.


	14. An Aftermath and a Resolution

**Author's Note:** This is it! Thanks to everyone to followed, favorited, and reviewed this story.

I wish I could have completed it earlier, but... c'est la vie. I made a significant outline change about a month and a half ago (I think) that affected my writing timeline. The end of the previous chapter reflects my originally intended ending (at least, the most important aspect of it), and this chapter reflects the change I made. If you happen to prefer the completely unhappy conclusion implied _without _this chapter (which was to be my original ending), then feel free to disregard this in your headcanon. But otherwise, if you're a bit of a softy like I confess to being, then consider this chapter a gift from me.

* * *

**Chapter Fourteen: An Aftermath and a Resolution**

* * *

Eugene was soaked from head to toe and chilled to the bone when he finally managed to stand up miserably and mount Max. He was almost afraid to leave the site, afraid that somehow the woman who had kept herself alive for centuries and manipulated an innocent into bringing her back from the dead would find a way to resurrect herself even from _this._ But he also knew that the formula he had spoken had done the job of taking apart the artificial body, and the gully-washing cold rain had washed away the constituent dust so thoroughly that it could never be brought together again. Gothel was never coming back to this world—and at last Eugene had to turn aside from this spot and steer the horse back toward the Diamond and Dagger.

There was no urgency this time, and Max did not seem in any hurry to get back either. Unhappily he trudged down the muddy road, his head hanging morosely. As for Eugene, all the grief that he had temporarily managed to banish was roaring back now that he had no task to distract him. He thought about the last time he had seen Rapunzel alive—the night that she returned to the house and threw herself into his arms. Tears formed in his eyes. The sole consolation he could take from it—other than having removed Gothel from the world—was that he had finally told her that he loved her. At least she had known that.

But it was too little, too late, he thought miserably. If she had known that before—and known it without doubts nagging at her mind as they had done for so long—then she probably would not have continued with her scheme to bring back the one person who she thought _had _loved her. If they had talked more, instead of her spending hours upon hours in a chemical-saturated room in his house—and later on, the tower—then they probably would have realized her true identity and could have met her birth parents. She would have had a family—_and so would he,_ he thought sickly. It could have gone so differently, if only...

The thought of her real parents sent Eugene's thoughts down a different, but equally unhappy, trail. He had not killed them himself, but their blood was on his hands, he thought. He realized that he might have been able to make amends for destroying their fragile peace and, indirectly, causing them to be removed from their position, if he had returned Rapunzel to them. But instead he had merely compounded the debt in a way that he could never pay back. Gothel came back because of his negligent, selfish attitude toward Rapunzel—the arrogant belief that he could profit from her experiments, the assurances he made to himself that he regarded her only as a physical companion, and the lack of attention he had devoted to her otherwise. If all that had not happened, they would be alive.

Eugene sighed and wiped the tears off his face. The hood on his cloak shielded his face from the still-falling drizzle, but it was very apparent that he had been crying. He didn't know what he was going to do anymore. The furious, deadly sense of purpose he'd had was gone. The most he could do for Rapunzel now was to see if he could have her interred with her family, and he wasn't sure he could even do that. The state would surely require proof that she was their daughter, and he didn't think he could provide that. And then, once she was lowered into the cold earth, then what? He realized that he couldn't bear to go back to his house—the house that had belonged to her murderer.

At last the Diamond and Dagger came in sight once more. A knot formed in Eugene's stomach, and he felt that he would burst into sobs again. Maybe, he thought, this would get better with time—but he doubted it. He tried to imagine his own future, but he couldn't envision being happy or content again. He couldn't stand the thought of the long, dark winter days that were swiftly approaching, cold days when the sun was in the sky only for a few hours. He could not get through it—he couldn't! No, he thought, he probably wouldn't last much longer himself. The thought was oddly comforting.

Maximus stopped at the inn and turned his head around to face Eugene. His large brown equine eyes were sad. Eugene patted the horse's head and dismounted, his face cast down toward the ground. He took a deep breath and began trudging toward the entrance of the inn.

When he went inside, the place was still dimly lit, smelling of damp wood, and empty of guests. Mr. Arkham was nowhere in sight. Eugene hung his sodden traveling cloak on the wall and began looking for the innkeeper. He headed behind the bar and saw him there, sitting on the floor, Rapunzel's limp body still draped across his beefy arms.

But her face was uncovered. Whereas Eugene had covered up her entire form, to hide the ghost-white skin (except for the hideously contrasting bruises around her neck where the woman had choked her), the innkeeper had, for some reason, uncovered her face. Eugene frowned as he approached. That seemed disrespectful...

Mr. Arkham whirled around as Eugene drew near. "Oh, it's you," he said. "You're back."

Eugene nodded silently. He couldn't speak. The lump in his stomach was quickly moving up to his throat.

"Did you—?"

Eugene nodded again. "She's gone for good," he said in a half-whisper. "She'll never trouble the world again."

Arkham glanced away from Eugene and looked at Rapunzel's face. For the first time, Eugene noticed that it was not quite as pale as it had been when he left.

The innkeeper began to speak hesitantly. "I don't know—you told me that there was witchcraft involved in this case," he said warily, "and I guess maybe that could explain it—but a while ago, about midway through the time you were gone, something happened here. She started breathing again."

Eugene felt faint. _"What?"_ he whispered, not daring to hope.

Mr. Arkham nodded. "I was still holdin' her, because nobody came in the whole time you were gone, and I felt it happen. That's why I uncovered her head. It's not deep, but it's there, and she's still doing it."

"Midway through," Eugene repeated. He could not believe what he was hearing. There was an air of unreality about this whole situation. Things like this just did not happen. –Though by this time, Eugene realized that it was ridiculous to dismiss it as impossible. "That must have been when I"—_when I what?_ he thought. Killed Gothel? Was she even properly alive?—"when I _finished the job,"_ he decided. "When the witch, as you said, was put down."

He couldn't imagine what kind of black magic had been unraveled with Gothel's corporeal dissolution, but that there _was _a connection between the two events, he could not doubt. He knelt down by Arkham and touched Rapunzel's face. It was warm now. His heart leapt. He reached out and gathered her in his arms. Then he and the innkeeper stood up.

"I wouldn't get my hopes up," Arkham warned. "I tried get her to wake up as soon as I noticed it, but it was no use. She's in a coma or something."

Eugene held her close to his own body protectively. "Maybe," he said, "but I won't stop trying." A part of him had to acknowledge that the man might be right—but this was so much better than what he had thought just minutes before that he couldn't dwell too heavily on that. He sat down in a chair to brace her form against his and fumbled in his satchel for something. "Here you go," he said, tossing some coins at Arkham.

"You didn't buy anything," the man said as he caught the money.

"No, but you kept her for me... and I hope you'll keep silence about the witchcraft."

Arkham nodded. "If she's really gone, then that should be the end of it."

"She's gone."

"Then no, we don't need a revival of the witch hunts," Arkham agreed.

Eugene stood up again. "No, we don't." He began walking toward the door. Halfway there, he stopped and turned around. "Thanks," he said in a parting voice. Then he grabbed his cloak and walked out the front door.

Maximus whinnied as Eugene approached. He looked curiously at Rapunzel. Eugene hoisted her limp form onto the horse's back and then got on himself. The horse seemed to recognize the fact that she was alive, for he let out a jubilant neigh and took off. Eugene had to grip the reins with one hand and hold Rapunzel around the stomach with the other. It was nerve-wracking, and the whole time he worried about the jostling and the possible effect on any internal injuries she might have, but within an hour they arrived at the old manor house.

Eugene gently lifted her off the horse and carried her inside. She still was not awake. He brought her upstairs, noticing Pascal's jaw drop open and his little chameleon eyes widen at the sight. The lizard scurried after him. He paused briefly at his room—their room, before she had started going to the tower—but bypassed it, carrying her into the next bedroom beyond it.

It was outfitted as a guest room, but since he had never entertained overnight guests, there was not as much there as there might have been. The furniture consisted of a smaller bed than the one in the master suite, a dresser with a mirror, a bedside table with an oil lamp, and a squashy blue-covered armchair.

He laid her down on the bed, unwrapped the dark cloth from her body, and examined her closely. She was dressed only in a filmy long-sleeved nightgown that he had given her. Her skin was mostly a normal color, except for those terrible bruises around her neck. However, he supposed that since her heart was now working, the bruises would heal with time. There was also a nasty lump on her head. He recalled the sounds he had heard in the inn that night. There had been a scream, a choking sound, and a thud. Queasily he realized that Gothel had thrown her violently to the floor after choking her. She could have a serious concussion, and that might be why she wasn't waking up.

Of course, Eugene realized, this was unprecedented anyway, so who knew what would be "normal"? As he gazed over her, he wondered how it could be possible that her body was even preserved well enough to return to life. When he found her in that secret cache underneath the bar, she was not breathing and her heart was still—he was absolutely certain of that, since he had desperately checked over her, looking for signs of life, before finally breaking out in sobs and covering her in the dark broadcloth. He had had the encounter in the crypt yesterday and had not woken up from it until today. That meant she had been dead for over a day and a half, close to two days now. The only possible explanation was that there was enough of the flower magic remaining in her body that _that _kept it from starting to decay.

When—if—she did wake up, he would have to ask her what, if anything, she remembered from the period. But he realized that there might be nothing he could ever know for sure about what had happened.

He lifted her body up gently and drew away the covers on the bed. Then he set her back down, letting her head rest on the pillow, and pulled them over her. As he turned away to go and get her a glass of water, he noticed that Pascal was waiting in the doorway, watching the proceedings. He smiled peacefully at the lizard. As he left the room, he noticed out the corner of his right eye that Pascal crept hesitantly into the room and leapt onto the pillow where his owner's head rested.

* * *

For days after that, Eugene kept a vigil by that bedside. He watched as the bruises turned purple, then greenish, and then began to fade entirely. He felt the lump on her head go down with time, but still she did not wake up even after two weeks. All that time, he had been gently pouring water and soup down her throat at meal times. That was all he dared to give her, and he had to be very careful in doing that, since he was terrified of pouring it down her airway and choking her with it. He changed her sheets regularly and sponged her down to keep her reasonably clean, as well as taking on the unpleasant task of disposing of certain byproducts. It was wretched work, he thought, but he would do it as long as it had to be done. However, the lack of solid food began to have an effect, and unhappily he watched her gradually lose weight despite his best efforts. He began to wonder if he would lose her in spite of everything.

Every night when he went to sleep, he feared that he would wake up and find her dead the next morning, dead and unrevivable this time, but it did not happen. His dreams were brutal, though, reflecting this fear of the cruelty of fate, as well as his own guilt about the murders of her parents—who did _not _return to life with Gothel's destruction. Whatever Gothel had done that allowed Rapunzel to return to life, she had not done it to them. He supposed that part of it had to be that they, even the former queen, did not possess any residual healing magic, but there was probably something else too. He just was not sure if he would ever know what it was.

Attila continued to come by and prepare food, and when he was there, he also passed on the latest news, including news of their state funeral and interment in the ancient royal cemetery. Eugene finally mustered up the nerve to confess to the ruffian who Rapunzel truly was and how he knew it. It was impossible to tell what his facial expression was behind that helmet he wore, but his body language was surprised for a moment. Then it became pitying and compassionate. "I hope she wakes up," he said haltingly.

But Eugene felt less certain now that it would happen. This, he thought despondently, was true penance, caring diligently for her as best he could, but all that possibly—probably?—being for nothing in the end.

Two weeks became three. The days grew gray and chill, the sun showed its face less and less, and rain turned to freezing rain and sleet. One particularly miserable night, right after he had been out to the stable to make sure that Maximus was all right and had a warm horse blanket, he went into the room where she still lay on her back, her eyelids closed. He hadn't seen her beautiful green eyes since the night she had fled to his house. Her body was rail-thin now, and between the icy mix coating the windows, the dank chill in the air, the starkness of the room, and the overall appearance of lifelessness that she gave, it was suddenly too much for him. He broke. He collapsed at the side of the bed and buried his head on the covers, sobbing.

"Rapunzel, please wake up," he cried, grabbing at her hands, which rested on her chest on top of the covers. "Please come back to me. I've tried so hard. Please don't leave me... not now. Not like this."

But she remained as unconscious as ever. At last, after what felt like hours of sobbing into the bed covers, Eugene drifted off to a fitful, unfulfilling sleep.

The next morning, he woke up to extreme pains in his knees and a dull throb in his back. Groaning, he realized that he had somehow fallen asleep kneeling beside the bed. He stood up, feeling his knee joints snap, and rubbed his back. He would pay for that today. He stretched for a moment and then glanced at the bed.

Rapunzel was turned on her side.

His heart began to pound. She had not moved of her own accord since he had brought her home. Something had changed last night. Hesitantly, hardly daring to breathe, he nudged her side.

She let out a drawn-out, sucking gasp, giving the impression of someone surfacing from a long swim underwater. She blinked, then turned gingerly and faced him. "Eugene?" she croaked. Her voice was very hoarse, as if the damage from being choked had not yet fully healed.

Tears sprang to his eyes. He collapsed on the mattress next to her and gathered her in his arms. A half-sob, half-laugh escaped him as he squeezed her. Her arms shook as she tried to hug him back. Her grip was very weak, but he didn't care about that. All that mattered was that she was awake.

"How did I get here?" she asked in that weak, scratchy voice. "Is she—"

"Shhh," he said comfortingly, stroking the back of her head. "She's gone. I found the tunnels... I found what you were looking for... I found _her..._ and I spoke the words to put her down. She'll never hurt you again."

Rapunzel looked panicked for a moment. "But the salts—it can be gathered—"

"Not this time it can't," he said. "I did it outside, and the rain washed it all away." He stroked her head again. "Also, the tunnels are sealed off on both ends. No one can get in there now... and that 'friend' of hers will be taken care of too, I think. She's never coming back, Rapunzel."

The panic that overspread her face seemed to melt away at his words. At last, she nodded silently and buried her face in his chest. A sob escaped from her, which Eugene wondered about briefly. Why should she feel anything but hate for that woman? She had even asked _him _to kill her on sight if he saw her. That was what she said in the letter she had left him. Then he realized that she might not know that Gothel wasn't her real mother. She might also think that Gothel had been influenced by others, the dark entities with whom she had trafficked, and whom she had been hoping to unleash on the world. Rapunzel might have told him to kill Gothel, and gone looking for the spell to do it herself, with the same frame of mind that one would unhappily shoot a beloved pet that had rabies. A necessary act, but a tragic one.

Eugene did not know what to say. It seemed far too soon to disabuse her of the notions she probably had, especially since one revelation—that of her true family and their fate—would be terribly painful for her to hear. He would have to tell her the truth sometime, but not just now.

He lifted her up and helped her to her feet. She was wobbly and unsteady, the muscles in her legs having atrophied a bit from disuse. He gripped her around the waist and let her cling to him as they went downstairs for some breakfast.

* * *

For the next week, she regained much of the weight that she had lost, since she could now eat solid food. Her appetite quickly increased as her body grew accustomed to it again, and her neck continued to heal from its injuries. Her voice became normal once more. Still, however, he said nothing to her about what he had discovered about her past after she ran away that night. He only mentioned the crypt, the locked rooms, and the being that he had accidentally brought forth, reassuring her—as she grew visibly frightened—that it meant them no harm and would probably depart once it had done what it intended to do.

They slept in separate beds. He did not ask her to join him in the master bedroom, feeling too ashamed of his past treatment of her and too concerned that she would take the invitation as a request to return to their previous arrangement, and she did not show any interest in sleeping there herself. Instead she remained in the guest room, moving her belongings in there quickly.

Then one morning a week after she had woken up, they were sitting side by side on a sofa in the parlor. Eugene had explained several days ago his theory about traces of the flower magic having kept her body preserved, a theory that Rapunzel agreed with. That morning, sitting on the couch, he finally asked her if she remembered anything that might shed light on how she had been able to return to life. At this question, her face turned chalk white and she shook. Eugene was about to tell her that it was all right, that she didn't have to answer, when she spoke.

"I think she kept me confined somehow," Rapunzel said, trembling. He pulled her close and held her thin hands in his. "I just remember darkness—except for this one barrier that surrounded me. It was like a net... and it burned me when I came up against it. But I don't recall having hands or anything. And then... I remember it was like the net just dissolved, just disappeared... there was a kind of wailing, except I didn't hear it with my ears; I heard it with my mind, if you can understand me. It was _her,_ I just know it." She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then continued. "Then I felt like I was pulled away from the darkness. And after that I don't remember anything until I woke up in the house."

He held her wordlessly, trying to contemplate what she had said. There was only one explanation that matched the facts. The horrible old hag had apparently trapped her in limbo, in a magical cage, and there could be only one good reason for doing so: to prevent him from resurrecting her using the same magic that she had been using herself on the remains of so many. Rather than leaving even the possibility that he might discover the way to bring her back, _and _denying her whatever might await her, Gothel would enchain her in darkness for as long as she herself walked the earth in her unnatural body. Gothel would not surrender control over her even after killing her. It was pure evil, motivated by nothing but spite and vindictiveness.

At that thought, Eugene decided that it was time to tell Rapunzel the truth about her parentage. She did not need to think that her _mother _had done that to her, and she definitely did not need to flagellate herself over the idea that her _mother _had been controlled by worse beings of which they had both failed to free her. Keeping his arms tightly around her, he began to tell about his discovery regarding Gothel's very long and sordid history, Rapunzel's own true parents—and their fate at that woman's hands.

Rapunzel sat in silence as he spoke. There was not a trace of emotion on her face during the narration. Then, when he was finished, she paused for another second before closing her eyes. Silent tears began to flow down her face.

That was too much for Eugene to watch. "I'm so sorry," he said, squeezing her.

She swallowed a hiccup and tried to compose herself. "It's my fault," she whispered.

After all he had thought about this subject while she was unconscious, he couldn't stand to hear her blame herself. "No, it isn't," he protested. "There is only one person who killed them. First and foremost it's _her _fault. But if we want to assign blame beyond that, it should be assigned to _me."_

"But you didn't bring her back."

"No," he agreed, "but _you _didn't bring her back with anything but the best, the highest, intentions. My intentions were the reprehensible ones... and if I'd just spent more time with you, I think we would have worked it out in time." He paused, hesitant to make the confession that was on the tip of his tongue, but finally deciding that it would be wrong to withhold anything else from her, even if it resulted in her renouncing him. "And there's something else," he admitted. "The reason they stepped down was because they fell into grief—"

"Over me," Rapunzel interrupted, her eyes cast down. "Over my kidnapping."

"No, they were able to govern for... uh... fourteen years after that," Eugene said reluctantly. "It was over the theft of the last relic they had of you... your crown. A very valuable piece," he said bitterly, "worth approximately the cost of this whole house."

Rapunzel sat for a moment as the implications washed over her. Then she let out a resigned, unhappy sigh, stood up, and walked toward the door. He was helpless to stop her. _You deserve nothing less,_ his conscience whispered.

She stopped in the doorway and turned around to look at him. Her face was sad, her features despondent. "I'm going to take Maximus to the island today," she said in a low voice. "I need to at least visit the spot and... pay my respects."

"Will you be coming back?" he croaked.

She looked pained. "I don't know," she whispered. Her eyes grew red and tears sprang into them. "I've felt uncomfortable in this house ever since I woke up, because of all the memories of being in that room... and now that I know it was _hers, _and that you acquired it because of—I mean—I don't know, Eugene, I just don't know."

Eugene couldn't be sure, but she seemed to be speaking of more than just the house. He couldn't particularly blame her, but even so, he felt his heart breaking. _You deserve that too,_ his conscience scolded him again. "All right," he managed to get out. "I... don't suppose you want me to come along."

Rapunzel looked guiltily at her shoes, but she still shook her head negatively. "I need to do this myself," she said. Giving him one last look, she fled the room. Shortly he heard her leave the house. He glanced out the window and saw her heading out on Maximus. He noticed that Pascal was perched on her shoulder, as he had once done.

_I guess this is how she felt for so long,_ he thought unhappily once she was gone. _Knowing that she was in love with me, but thinking, believing, that I didn't return it. I just hope I'm as wrong about her as she was about me—as I was about myself._

Rapunzel did not come back that night. He felt a spark of fear as the sky grew dark and he realized that she was indeed spending the night at an inn in the city. It reminded him horribly of the times that she had gone out to that tower, only to spend the night out there. He thought of the possibility that the "creatures" that had held her captive in the tower might still be out there somewhere, even though their mistress was gone. Then he remembered the being that he had brought to life in the crypt. Surely that personage, whoever it was, would find and destroy them. They had told Gothel of Rapunzel's escape, but they were not with her when she committed her murders or when Eugene found her. That meant they had either returned to the tower—where that unknown person would have destroyed them the very day it was raised up—or they had gone to the castle of the sinister man who had been Gothel's colleague, in which case they would suffer the same fate as he. The consideration calmed Eugene. With Maximus, Rapunzel would not need to walk the lonely, dangerous roads herself, and there should be nothing out there that specifically was hunting _her _down.

That did not mean that she would ever return to _him._ He knew that. But at least it was some comfort.

* * *

It was approaching noon the following day when the horse trudged up to the house—_alone._ Eugene leapt out of his chair as he saw it, panicking, feeling his heart thump in terror. He dashed toward the animal.

"What happened to her?" he exclaimed as he met the horse. "Why isn't she here? Is she all right?"

Maximus neighed and seemed to nod his head. At any rate, he didn't look sad or panicked. Eugene quickly mounted the animal. "Take me to her," he ordered.

The horse gave him an even look, as if he resented being commanded by this man, and at once Eugene realized what was about to happen. Before he could stop him, Maximus took off at a swift gallop. It was all Eugene could do to hold on.

Maximus galloped through the small village, passing by the Snuggly Duckling and the old dam. He tore through the woods, hooves breaking twigs and making the soggy fallen leaves slosh like mud. At last the footbridge to the island came in sight, but Max did not slow down. He ran across the bridge, passing pedestrians who looked up in surprise and indignation at nearly being trampled. At last he slowed down as he approached the royal cemetery. He stopped outside the gates. Panting for breath, Eugene got down and crept into the graveyard.

It did not take him long to find Rapunzel. She was seated before a large, dignified, yet sad marble statue of an angel. Flowers covered the base of the statue, a sharply colorful contrast with the gloom of early winter that surrounded everything. She was clutching Pascal in her hands to keep him warm. Her head was bent over her knees, and he could tell as he approached her that she was crying.

She glanced up as she heard his footsteps, displaying a red, tear-stained face. "Eugene," she said quietly.

He sat down next to her. "Maximus came back to the house by himself," he explained. "So I got worried and came back looking for you."

"Oh," Rapunzel said. "I didn't know he was gone."

"How long have you been sitting here?"

"I don't know," she said again. "I came out here around nine o'clock. I don't know what time it is now." She buried her head between her knees again.

"You've been sitting on this cold ground all that time?" Alarm was in his voice.

She looked up again. "Eugene, I—" Her voice broke. "They laughed at me. They called me a liar."

Indignation rose up in him. He was sure he knew _what _she had said to prompt this reaction, but he couldn't guess whom she had told. "Who did?" he asked angrily.

"The council," she said in a shuddering voice. "After I was finished here yesterday, I found them. I didn't want to _disband _them and I told them so... I wouldn't know anything about ruling. I just told them who I was... and they didn't believe me." Tears fell from her face. "They said the princess had been blonde. I told them I used to be—I told them what my hair could do—and they just laughed and said that obviously I was just someone who had heard the story of the flower, who knew I looked like the queen, and had come up with a story to account for the fact that I didn't have the right color hair." She took a deep, shaky breath. She could not meet his eyes as she continued her narrative. "And then one of them—I think it was the Captain of the Guard—said he knew who I was, that I had been living with you—except he didn't use your real name—and said I had 'obviously learned your tricks.'" She looked down at the ground as tears dropped from her eyes to the frozen earth. "Then they ran me out of the room, calling me a slut. I've only ever heard _her _call me that."

He knew at once whom she meant. That conversation with Gothel the day that the shipment of coffins arrived came back to his mind. He had figured out then that Gothel had been slurring her with such terms. This confirmed it—and now, not content with just falsely calling her a liar, the council had gratuitously attacked her with that.

And that, he thought wretchedly, was his fault too.

"You're not," he said at once. "Don't let them, or anyone else, convince you that you are. And Rapunzel, I'm really sorry about the crown thing," he continued in a quiet voice. "If I could take it back, I would in a minute. I'm sorrier than I have words for... so if that's the reason you didn't want to come back, I really hope you'll forgive me."

She took another shuddering breath, which ended in a dry cough. It occurred to him that she was probably suffering from being out in the cold for so many hours. He took off his cloak and threw it around her at once. "Thanks," she said quietly. "It's... not really that, though. The crown, I mean."

His hopes were falling as she spoke. "Then what is it?" he said resignedly. Whatever "it" was, it was apparently something that would keep her from accepting him again.

"It's the house," she said in a half-whisper.

His heart skipped a beat. "Just the house?" he asked.

"Just the house," she repeated. She finally looked up and met his eyes. "I understand, I mean, it's your house and you would naturally want to live there, as you have for a year... but it means something different to me, and Eugene, I just can't go back to how it was—in that house. Not now."

He stared ahead for what seemed like an eternity. Rapunzel couldn't go back to living in the house, she had said. He could not blame her for that. Hadn't he had a similar revulsion, not just toward the house, but toward life itself, when he had thought she was dead? And now she had been told by the civil authorities that she would never even be recognized officially for who and what she was. If she lived in Corona, it would be with the knowledge that the council regarded her with contempt, as a liar, schemer, and "slut," and that nothing would change their minds.

In the blistering cold of that day, Eugene realized what he had to do. "Rapunzel," he began, "if it's really just the house, I understand, and I'll sell the house. We can leave. We can go far away from here—if you want. And if you want me around—with you. Just us, Max, and Pascal." He thought for a second about the Snuggly Duckling crowd, but the thought did not linger. He would miss them—other than Rapunzel, they were the closest he had ever had to friends—but if it was a choice between them and her, she won. They would get along fine.

She sat contemplating for a moment. Then she glanced up at him again. "You would do that?" she whispered.

He put an arm around her and pulled her close to warm her. "I would. And it would be on—honorable terms. No one should insult you, but if this is what you want—to start over somewhere else—then this time I wouldn't even give them ammunition."

She curled against him. "I do want that," she said softly. "I don't know if it will be possible, but... I want to put the grief, the regrets, the horrible nightmares behind me, and _try _to be happy again."

"You deserve to," he said, keeping her close.

They stayed there for a few more minutes before finally standing up again. Rapunzel gave the angel statue one last look as she left hand in hand with him.

* * *

_Five months later..._

It had been a long, cold winter, a winter spent largely indoors in a rented flat in Bristol—the port from which they had finally set sail across the great ocean when the weather was pleasant enough—but it had been better than trudging unhappily across the grounds of the manor house on the mainland of the Continent as bad memories flooded their mind with every step.

They still had plenty of money; he had withdrawn his wealth from the bank he'd kept it in and added to it the price he had gotten the state of Corona to pay for the old house back in the old world. She had ribbed him about selling it to the state to be converted to a municipal building when he had purchased it with money from an artifact he had _stolen _from the state. In response, he merely said that he _would _have given it to them if the council had not viciously insulted _her_ honor in two different ways.

However, they were not planning to live a life of idleness. That false dream, he realized, was part of his problem and the cause of the selfish sense of entitlement he'd had. He was going to open up a store that sold books and jewelry—an odd combination, perhaps, but types of merchandise about which he knew a great deal. The belongings they had chosen to take with them—their clothes, books, some furniture, and those significant things that they could not bear to part with—were packed up in trunks. Still, much of their furniture would be new. That would be better, they agreed.

They stood on the ship's deck, the chameleon perched on her shoulder, watching as the waves broke against the distant—but rapidly approaching—spring-brightened shore. The warm, charming little port city rose above the shore line, with gabled, gambrel, and flat roofs adorning white-columned brick facades. This would be their new home, a happy, bustling town in a new land full of people that word had it were bursting with the rogue spirit, the fiercely independent, industrious spark that _they _both had when they were at their best. They would fit right in, and he hoped that being surrounded by this sparkle and optimism would continue to heal her. With the money, they had been able to secure a nice house on the outskirts of the town, a new one with plenty of room for them and a grassy yard for Maximus to enjoy. The house was awaiting their arrival this very minute. Best of all, nobody here knew them. Nobody knew their dark pasts. No one would have cause to prejudge them. Maybe with time, they too could forget the darkness, or at least banish it to the far corners of their minds.

As the ship drew closer to the port, she felt a rush of hope and anticipation flood her. She glanced up at him and met his eyes. He gave her a faint, but nonetheless distinct, smile. He felt it too. She managed to smile back at him for a moment before turning away and facing the town again. Perhaps the change had begun.


End file.
